Calla Bryn Sturgis
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 00:10:42 -0800
--------
1
Tian was blessed (although few farmers would use such a word) with
three patches: River Field, where his family had grown rice since time
out of mind; Roadside Field, where ka-Jaffords had grown sharproot,
pumpkin, and corn for those same long years and generations; and Son of
a Bitch, a thankless tract which mostly grew rocks and blisters and
busted hopes. Tian wasn't the first Jaffords determined to make
something of the twenty acres behind the home place; his gran-pere,
pefectly sane in all other respects, had been convinced there was gold
there. Tian's mother had been equally positive it would grow porin, a
spice of great worth. Tian's insanity was madrigal. Of course
madrigal would grow in Son of a Bitch. Must grow there. He had gotten
hold of a thousand seeds (and a dear penny they had cost him) which
were now hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. All that
remained before planting next year was to break ground in Son of a
Bitch. This was a chore easier spoken of than accomplished.
Tian was blessed with livestock, including three mules, but a man would
be mad to try using a mule out in Son of a Bitch; the beast unlucky
enough to draw such duty would likely be lying legbroke or stung to
death by noon of the first day. One of Tian's uncles had almost met
this latter fate some years before. He had come running back to the
home place, screaming at the top of his lungs and pursued by huge mutie
wasps with stingers the size of nails.
They had found the nest (well, Andy had found it; Andy wasn't
bothered by wasps no matter how big they were) and burned it with
kerosene, but there might be others. Then there were the holes. You
couldn't burn holes, could you? No. And Son of a Bitch sat on what
the old folks called "loose ground." It was consequently possessed of
almost as many holes as rocks, not to mention at least one cave that
puffed out draughts of nasty, decay-smelling air. Who knew what
boggarts might lurk down its dark throat?
As for the holes, the worst of them weren't out where a man (or a
mule) could see them. Not at all, sir. Never think so, thankee-sai. The
leg-breakers were always concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of weeds
and high grass. Your mule would step in, there would come a bitter
crack like a snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying
there on the ground, teeth bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at
the sky. Until you put it out of its misery, that was, and stock was
valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn't precisely
threaded.
Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to.
Tia was roont, hence good for little else. She was a big girl--the
roont ones often grew to prodigious size--and she was willing, Man
Jesus love her. The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he called
a crucifix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung back and forth now,
thumping against her sweating skin as she pulled.
The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind
her, alternately guiding the plow by its old ironwood handles and his
sister by the hame-traces, Tian grunted and yanked and pushed when the
blade of the plow dropped down and verged on becoming stuck. It was the
end of Full Earth but as hot as midsummer here in Son of a Bitch;
Tia's overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty
thighs. Each time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes,
sweat flew out of the mop in a spray.
"Gee, ye bitch!" he cried. "Yon rock's a plow-breaker, are ye blind?"
Not blind; not deaf, either; just stupid. Roont. She heaved to the
left, and hard. Behind her, Tian stumbled forward with a neck-snapping
jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he hadn't seen and the
plow had, for a wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of
blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not for the first
time) what madness it was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In
his deepest heart he had an idea that madrigal would sow no more than
the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-grass; yep, he
could have bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The
trick was to keep it out, and it was always New Earth's first chore.
It--
The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling
his arms out of their sockets. "Arr!" he cried. "Go easy, girl! I
can't grow em back if you pull em out, can I?"
Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of
low-hanging clouds and honked laughter. Man Jesus, but she even sounded
like a donkey. Yet it was laughter, human laughter. Tian wondered, as
he sometimes couldn't help doing, if that laughter meant anything.
Did she understand some of what he was saying, or did she only respond
to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones--
"Good day, sai," said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from
behind him. The owner of the voice ignored Tian's scream of surprise.
"Pleasant days, and may they be long upon the earth. I am here from a
goodish wander and at your service."
Tian whirled around, saw Andy standing there--all twelve feet of
him--and was then almost jerked flat as his sister took another of her
lurching steps forward. The plow's hame-traces were pulled from his
hands and flew around his throat with an audible snap. Tia, unaware of
this potential disaster, took another sturdy step forward. When she
did, Tian's wind was cut off. He gave a whooping, gagging gasp and
clawed at the straps. All of this Andy watched with his usual large and
meaningless smile.
Tia jerked forward again and Tian was pulled off his feet. He landed on
a rock that dug savagely into the cleft of his buttocks, but at least
he could breathe again. For the moment, anyway. Damned unlucky field!
Always had been! Always would be!
Tian snatched hold of the leather strap before it could pull tight
around his throat again and yelled, "Hold, ye bitch! Whoa up if you
don't want me to twist yer great and useless tits right off the front
of yer!"
Tia halted agreeably enough and looked back to see what was what. Her
smile broadened. She lifted one heavily muscled arm--it glowed with
sweat--and pointed. "Andy!" she said. "Andy's come!"
"I ain't blind," Tian said and got to his feet, rubbing his bottom.
Was that part of him also bleeding? He had an idea it was.
"Good day, sai," Andy said to her, and tapped his metal throat three
times with his three metal fingers. "Long days and pleasant nights."
Although Tia had surely heard the standard response to this--And may
you have twice the number--a thousand times or more, all she could do
was once more raise her broad idiot's face to the sky and utter her
donkey laugh. Tian felt a surprising moment of pain, not in his arms or
throat or outraged ass but in his heart. He vaguely remembered her as a
little girl: as pretty and quick as a dragonfly, as smart as ever you
could wish. Then--
But before he could finish the thought, a premonition came. Except that
was too fine a word for it. In fact, it was time. Overtime. Yet he felt
a sinking in his heart. The news would come while I'm out here, too,
he thought. Out in this godforsaken patch where nothing is well and all
luck is bad.
"Andy," he said.
"Yes!" Andy said, smiling. "Andy, your friend! Back from a goodish
wander and at your service. Would you like your horoscope, sai Tian? It
is Full Earth. The moon is red, what is called the Huntress Moon in
Mid-World that was. A friend will call! Business affairs prosper! You
will have two ideas, one good and one bad--"
"The bad one was coming out here to turn this field," Tian said. "Never
mind my goddam horoscope, Andy. Why are you here?"
Andy's smile probably could not become troubled--he was a robot,
after all, the last one in Calla Bryn Sturgis or for miles and wheels
around--but to Tian it seemed to grow troubled, just the same. The
robot looked like a young child's stick-figure of an adult,
impossibly tall and impossibly thin. His legs and arms were silvery.
His head was a stainless steel barrel with electric eyes. His body, no
more than a cylinder seven feet high, was gold. Stamped in the
middle--what would have been a man's chest--was this legend:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH LaMERK INDUSTRIES
PRESENTS
ANDY
Design: MESSENGER (Many Other Functions)
Serial # DNF 34821 V 63
Why or how this silly thing had survived when all the rest of the
robots were gone--gone for generations--Tian neither knew nor cared.
You were apt to see him anywhere in the Calla (he would not venture
beyond its borders) striding on his impossibly long silver legs,
looking everywhere, occasionally clicking to himself as he stored (or
perhaps purged--who knew?) information. He sang songs, passed on gossip
and rumor from one end of town to the other--a tireless walker was Andy
the robot--and seemed to enjoy the giving of horoscopes above all
things, although there was general agreement in the village that they
meant little.
He had one other function, however, and that meant much.
"Why are ye here, ye bag of bolts and beams? Answer me! Is it the
Wolves? Are they coming from Thunderclap?"
Tian stood there looking up into Andy's stupid smiling metal face,
the sweat growing cold on his skin, praying with all his might that the
foolish thing would say no, then offer to tell his horoscope again, or
perhaps to sing "The Green Corn A-Dayo," all twenty or thirty verses.
But all Andy said, still smiling, was: "Yes, sai."
"Christ and the Man Jesus," Tian said (he'd gotten an idea from the
Old Fella that those were two names for the same thing, but had never
bothered pursuing the question). "How long?"
"One moon of days before they arrive," Andy replied, still smiling.
"From full to full?"
"Yes, sai."
Thirty days, then. Thirty days to the Wolves. And there was no sense
hoping Andy was wrong. No one kenned how the robot could know they were
coming out of Thunderclap so far in advance of their arrival, but he
did know. And he was never wrong.
"Fuck you for your bad news!" Tian cried, and was furious at the waver
he heard in his own voice. "What use are you?"
"I'm sorry that the news is bad," Andy said. His guts clicked
audibly, his eyes flashed a brighter blue, and he took a step backward.
"Would you not like me to tell your horoscope? This is the end of Wide
Earth, a time particularly propitious for finishing old business and
meeting new people--"
"And fuck your false prophecy, too!!" Tian bent, picked up a clod of
earth, and threw it at the robot. A pebble buried in the clod clanged
off Andy's metal hide. Tia gasped, then began to cry. Andy backed off
another step, his shadow trailing out spider-long in Son of a Bitch
field. But his hateful, stupid smile remained.
"What about a song? I have learned an amusing one from the Manni far
north of town; it is called 'In Time of Loss, Make God Your Boss.'
" From somewhere deep in Andy's guts came the wavering honk of a
pitch-pipe, followed by a ripple of piano keys. "It goes--"
Sweat rolling down his cheeks and sticking his itchy balls to his
thighs. Tia blatting her stupid face at the sky. And this idiotic,
bad-news-bearing robot getting ready to sing him some sort of Manni
hymn.
"Be quiet, Andy." He spoke reasonably enough, but through clamped
teeth.
"Sai," the robot agreed, then fell mercifully silent.
Tian went to his bawling sister, put his arm around her, smelled the
large (but not entirely unpleasant) work-smell of her. He sighed, then
began to stroke her trembling arm.
"Quit it, ye great bawling cunt," he said. The words might have been
ugly but the tone was kind in the extreme, and it was tone she
responded to. She began to quiet. Her brother stood with the flare of
her hip pushing into him just below his ribcage (she was a full foot
taller), and any passing stranger would likely have stopped to look at
them, amazed by the similarity of face and the great dissimilarity of
size. The resemblance, at least, was honestly come by: they were twins.
He soothed his sister with a mixture of endearments and profanities--in
the years since she had come back roont from the west, the two modes of
expression were much the same to Tian Jaffords--and at last she ceased
her weeping. And when a rustie flew across the sky, doing loops and
giving out the usual series of ugly blats, she pointed and laughed.
A feeling was rising in Tian, one so foreign to his nature that he
didn't even recognize it. "Ain't right," he said. "Nossir. By the
Man Jesus and all the gods that be, it ain't." He looked to the west,
where the hills rolled away into a rising membranous darkness that
might have been clouds but wasn't. It was the borderland between
Mid-World and End-World. The edge of Thunderclap.
"Ain't right what they do to us."
"Sure you wouldn't like to hear your horoscope, sai? I see many
bright coins and a beautiful dark lady."
"The dark ladies will have to do without me," Tian said, and began
pulling the harness off his sister's broad shoulders. "I'm married,
as I'm sure ye very well know."
"Many a married man has had his jilly," Andy observed. To Tian he
sounded almost smug.
"Not those who love their wives." Tian shouldered the harness (he'd
made it himself, there being a marked shortage of tack for human beings
in most livery barns) and turned toward the home place. "And not
farmers, in any case. Show me a farmer who can afford a jilly and
I'll kiss your shiny ass. Go on, Tia."
"Home place?" she asked.
"That's right."
"Lunch at home place?" She looked at him in a muddled, hopeful way.
"Taters?" A pause. "Gravy?"
"Shore," Tian said. "Why the hell not?"
Tia let out a whoop and began running toward the house. There was
something almost awe-inspiring about her when she ran. As their father
had once observed, not long before the brain-storm that carried him
off, "Bright or dim, that's a lot of meat in motion."
Tian walked slowly after her, head down, watching for the holes which
his sister seemed to avoid without even looking, as if some strange
deep part of her had mapped the location of each one. That strange new
feeling kept growing and growing. He knew about anger--any farmer
who'd ever lost cows to the milk-sick or watched a summer hailstorm
beat his corn flat knew plenty about anger--but this was deeper. This
was rage, and it was a new thing. He walked slowly, head down, fists
clenched. He wasn't aware of Andy following along behind him until
the robot said, "There's other news, sai. Northwest of town, along
the path of the Beam, strangers from Out-World--"
"Bugger the Beam, bugger the strangers, and bugger your good self,"
Tian said. "Let me be, Andy."
Andy stood where he was for a moment, surrounded by the rocks and weeds
and useless knobs of Son of a Bitch, that thankless tract of Jaffrey
land. Relays inside him clicked. His eyes flashed. And he decided to go
and talk to the Old Fella. The Old Fella never told him to bugger his
good self. The Old Fella was always willing to hear his horoscope.
And he was always interested in strangers.
Andy started toward town and Our Lady of Serenity.
2
Zalia Jaffords didn't see her husband and sister-in-law come back
from Son of a Bitch; didn't hear Tia plunging her head repeatedly
into the rain-barrel outside the barn and then blowing moisture off her
lips like a horse. Zalia was on the south side of the house, hanging
out wash and keeping an eye on the children. She wasn't aware that
Tian was back until she saw him looking out the kitchen window at her.
She was surprised to see him there at all and much more than surprised
at the look of him. His face was ashy pale except for two bright blots
of color high up on his cheeks and a third glaring in the center of his
forehead like a brand.
She dropped the few pins she was still holding back into her clothes
basket and started for the house.
"Where goin, Ma?" Heddon called, and "Where goin, Maw-Maw?" Hedda
echoed.
"Never mind," she said. "Just keep a eye on your ka-babbies."
"Why-yyy?" Hedda whined. She had that whine down to a science. One of
these days she would draw it out a little too long and her mother would
clout her over the hills and far away.
"Because ye're the oldest," she said.
"But--"
"Shut your mouth, Hedda Jaffords."
"We'll watch em, Ma," Heddon said. Always agreeable was her Heddon;
probably not quite so bright as his sister, but bright wasn't
everything. Far from it. "Want us to finish hanging the wash?"
"Hed-donnnn..." From his sister. That irritating whine again. But she
had no time for them. She just took one glance at the others: Lyman and
Lia, who were five, and Aaron, who was two. Aaron sat naked in the
dirt, happily chunking two stones together. He was the rare singleton,
and how the women of the village envied her on account of him! Because
Aaron would always be safe. The others, however, Heddon and
Hedda...Lyman and Lia...
She suddenly understood what it might mean, him back at the house in
the middle of the day like this. She prayed to the gods it wasn't so,
but when she came into the kitchen and saw the way he was looking out
at the kiddies, she feared it was.
"Tell me it isn't the Wolves," she said in a dry and frantic voice.
"Say it's not."
"It is," Tian replied. "Thirty days, Andy says--moon to moon. And on
that Andy's never--"
Before he could go on, Zalia Jaffords clapped her hands to her temples
and voiced a shriek. In the side yard, Hedda jumped up. In another
moment she would have been running for the house, but Heddon held her
back.
"They won't take any as young as Lymon and Lia, will they?" she asked
him. "Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not the babbies? Not my little
ones? Why, they won't see their sixth for another half-year!"
"The Wolves have taken em as young as three, and you know it," Tian
said. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. That feeling
inside him continued to grow--the feeling that was deeper than mere
anger.
She looked at him, tears spilling down her face.
"Mayhap it's time to say no." Tian spoke in a voice he hardly
recognized as his own.
"How can we?" she whispered. "Oh, T, how in the name of all the gods
can we?"
"Dunno," he said. "But come here, woman, I beg you."
She came, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the five
children in the back yard--as if to make sure they were still all
there, that no Wolves had taken them yet--and then crossed the living
room. Gran-pere sat in his corner chair by the dead fire, head bent
over, dozing and drizzling from his folded, toothless mouth.
>From this room the barn was visible. Tian drew his wife to the window
and pointed. "There," he said. "Do you mark em, woman? Do you see em
very well?"
Of course she did. Tian's sister, six and a half feet tall, now
standing with the straps of her overalls lowered and her big breasts
sparkling with water as she splashed them from the rain-barrel.
Standing in the barn doorway was Zalman, Zalia's very own brother.
Almost seven feet tall he was, big as Lord Perth and as empty of face
as the girl. A strapping young man watching a strapping young woman
with her breasts out on show like that might well have been sporting a
bulge in his pants, but there was none in Zally's. Nor ever would be.
He was roont.
She turned back to T. They looked at each other, a man and woman not
roont, but only because of dumb luck. So far as either of them knew, it
could just as easily have been Zal and Tia standing in here and
watching Tian and Zalia out by the barn, grown large of body and empty
of head.
"Of course I see," she told him. "Does ye think I'm blind?"
"Don't it sometimes make you wish you was?" he asked. "To see em so?"
Zalia made no reply.
"Not right, woman. Not right. Never has been."
"But since time out of mind--"
"Bugger time out of mind, too!" Tian cried. "They's children! Our
children!"
"Would you have the Wolves burn the Calla to the ground, then? Leave us
all with our throats cut? That or worse? For it's happened in other
places. You know it has."
He knew, all right. And who would put matters right, if not the men of
Calla Bryn Sturgis? Certainly there were no authorities, not so much as
a sheriff, either high or low, in these parts. They were on their own.
Even long ago, when the Inner Baronies had glowed with light and
culture, they would have seen precious little sign of that bright-life
out here. These were the borderlands, and life here had always been
strange. Then the Wolves had begun coming and life had grown far
stranger. How long ago had it begun? How many generations? Tian
didn't know, but he thought "time out of mind" was too long. The
Wolves had been raiding into the borderland villages when Gran-pere was
young, certainly--Gran-pere's own twin had been snatched as the two
of them sat in the dust, playing at jacks. "Dey tuk eem cos he closah
to de rud," Gran-pere had told them (many times). "Eef Ah come out of
dee house firs' da' day, Ah be closah to de rud an dey take me, God
is good!" Then he would kiss the wooden cross the Old Fella had given
him, hold it skyward, and cackle.
Yet Gran-pere's own Gran-pere had told him that in his day--which
would have been five or perhaps even six generations back, if Tian's
calculations were right--that there had been no Wolves sweeping out of
Thunderclap on their horrible gray horses. Once Tian had asked the old
man, And did all but a few of the babbies come in twos back then? Did
yer Old Fella ever say? Gran-pere had considered this long, then had
shaken his head. No, he couldn't remember that his Gran-pere had ever
said about that, one way or the other.
Zalia was looking at him anxiously. "Ye're in no mood to think of
such things, I wot, after spending your morning in that rocky patch."
"My frame of mind won't change when they come or who they'll take,"
Tian said.
"Ye'll not do something foolish, T, will you? Something foolish and
all on your own?"
"No," he said.
No hesitation. He's already begun to lay plans, she thought, and
allowed herself a thin gleam of hope. Surely there was nothing Tian
could do against the Wolves--nothing any of them could do--but he was
far from stupid. In a farming village where most men could think no
further than hoeing the next row or planting their stiffies on Saturday
night, Tian was something of an anomaly. He could write his name; he
could write words which said I LOVE YOU ZALLIE (and had won her by so
doing, even though she couldn't read them there in the dirt); he
could add the numbers and also call them back from big to small, which
he said was even more difficult. Was it possible...?
Part of her didn't want to complete that thought. And yet, when she
turned her mother's heart and mind to Hedda and Heddon, Lia and
Lyman, part of her wanted to hope. "What, then?"
"I'm going to call a meeting at the Town Gathering Hall," he said.
"I'll send the feather. "
"Willl they come?"
"When they hear this news, every man in the Calla will turn up. We'll
talk it over. Mayhap they'll want to fight this time. Mayhap
they'll want to fight for their babbies."
>From behind them, a cracked old voice said, "Ye foolish killin."
Tian and Zalia turned, hand in hand, to look at the old man. Killin was
a harsh word, but Tian judged the old man was looking at them--at
him--kindly enough.
"Why d'ye say so, Gran-pere?" he asked.
"Men'd go forrad from such a meetin as ye plan on and burn down
hat' countryside, were dey in drink," the old man said. "Men sober--"
He shook his head. "Ye'll never move such."
"I think this time you might be wrong, Grand-pere," Tian said, and
Zalia felt cold terror squeeze her heart. He believed it. He really
did.
3
There would have been less grumbling if he'd given them at least one
night's notice, but Tian wouldn't do that. One moon of days before
they arrive, Andy had said, and that was all the horoscope Tian
Jaffords needed. They didn't have the luxury of even a single fallow
night. And when he sent Heddon and Hedda with the feather, they did
come. He'd known they would. It had been over twenty years since the
Wolves last came calling to Calla Bryn Sturgis, and times had been
good. If they were allowed to reap this time, the crop would be a large
one.
The Calla's Gathering Hall was an adobe at the end of the village
high street, beyond Took's General Store and cater-corner from the
town pavillion, which was now dusty and dark with the end of summer.
Soon enough the ladies of the town would begin decorating it for Reap,
but they'd never made a lot of Reaping Night in the Calla. The
children always enjoyed seeing the stuffy-guys thrown on the fire, of
course, and the bolder fellows would steal their share of kisses as the
night itself approached, but that was about it. Your fripperies and
festivals might do for Mid-World and In-World, but this was neither.
Out here they had more serious things to worry about than Reaping Day
Fairs.
Things like the Wolves.
Some of the men--from the well-to-do farms to the east and the three
ranches to the south--came on horses. Eisenhart of the Lazy B even
brought his rifle and wore crisscrossed ammunition bandoliers. (Tian
Jaffords doubted if the bullets were any good, or that the ancient
rifle would fire even if some of them were.) A delegation of the Manni
folk came crammed into a buckboard drawn by a pair of mutie
geldings--one with three eyes, the other with a pylon of raw pink flesh
poking out of its back. Most of the Calla's menfolk came on donkeys
and burros, dressed in their white pants and long colorful shirts. They
knocked their dusty sombreros back on the tugstrings with callused
thumbs as they stepped into the Gathering Hall, looking uneasily at
each other. The benches were of plain pine. With no womenfolk and none
of the roont ones, the men filled less than thirty of the ninety
benches. There was some talk, but no laughter at all.
Tian stood out front with the feather now in his hands, watching the
sun as it sank toward the horizon, its gold steadily deepening to a
color that was like infected blood. When it touched the hills, he took
one more look up the high street. It was empty except for three or four
roont fellas sitting on the steps of Took's. All of them huge and
good for nothing more than yanking rocks out of the ground. He saw no
more men, no more approaching donkeys. He took a deep breath, let it
out, then drew in another and looked up at the deepening sky.
"Man Jesus, I don't believe in you," he said. "But if you're there,
help me now. Tell God thankee."
Then he went inside and closed the Gathering Hall doors a little harder
than was strictly necessary. The talk stopped. A hundred and forty men,
most of them farmers, watched him walk to the front of the hall, the
wide legs of his white pants swishing, his shor'-boots clacking on
the hardwood floor. He had expected to be terrified by this point,
perhaps even to find himself speechless. He was a farmer, not a stage
performer or a politician. Then he thought of his children, and when he
looked up at the men, he found he had no trouble meeting their eyes.
The feather in his hands did not tremble. When he spoke, his words
followed each other easily, naturally, and coherently. They might not
do as he hoped they would--Gran-pere might be right about that--but he
saw they were willing enough to listen. And wasn't that the necessary
first step?
"You all know who I am," he said as he stood there with his hands
clasped around the reddish feather's ancient stalk. "Tian Jaffords,
son of Alan Jaffords, husband of Zalia Hoonik that was. She and I have
five, two pairs and a singleton."
Low murmurs at that, most probably having to do with how lucky Tian and
Zalia were, how lucky with their Aaron. Tian waited for the voices to
die away.
"I've lived in the Calla all my life. I've shared your khef and you
have shared mine. Now hear what I say, I beg you."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured. It was little more than a stock
response, yet Tian was encouraged.
"The Wolves are coming," he said. "I have this news from Andy. Thirty
days from moon to moon and then they're here."
More low murmurs. Tian heard dismay and outrage, but no surprise. When
it came to spreading news, Andy was extremely efficient.
"Even those of us who can read and write a little have almost no paper
to write on," Tian said, "so I cannot tell ye with any real certainty
when last they came. There are no records, ye ken, just one mouth to
another. I know I was well-breeched, so it's longer than twenty
years--"
"It's twenty-four," said a voice in the back of the room.
"Nay, twenty-three," said a voice closer to the front, and Reuben
Caverra stood up. He was a plump man with a round, cheerful face. The
cheer was gone from it now, however, and it showed only distress. "They
took Ruth, my sissy: hear me, I beg."
A murmur--really no more than a vocalized sigh of agreement--came from
the men sitting crammed together on the benches. They could have spread
out, but had chosen shoulder-to-shoulder instead. Sometimes there was
comfort in discomfort, Tian reckoned.
Reuben said, "We were playing under the big pine in the front yard when
they came. I made a mark on that tree each year after. Even after they
brung her back, I went on with em. It's twenty-three marks and
twenty-three years." With that he sat down.
"Twenty-three or twenty-four, makes no difference," Tian said. "Those
who were babbies--or kiddies--when the Wolves came last time have grown
up since and had kiddies of their own. There's a fine crop here for
those bastards. A fine crop of children." He paused, giving them a
chance to think of the next idea for themselves before speaking it
aloud. "If we let it happen," he said at last. "If we let the Wolves
take our children into Thunderclap and then send them back to us
roont."
"What the hell else can we do?" cried a man sitting on one of the
middle benches. "They's not human!" At this there was a general (and
miserable) mumble of agreement.
One of the Manni stood up, pulling his dark blue cloak tight against
his bony shoulders. He looked around at the others with baleful eyes.
They weren't mad, those eyes, but to Tian they looked a long league
from reasonable. "Hear me, I beg," he said.
"We say thankee-sai." Respectful but reserved. To see a Manni up close
was a rare thing, and here were eight, all in a bunch. Tian was
delighted they had come. If anything would underline the deadly
seriousness of this business, the appearance of the Manni would do it.
The Gathering Hall door opened and one more man slipped inside. None of
them, including Tian, noticed. They were watching the Manni.
"Hear what the Book says: When the Angel of Death passed over Aegypt,
he killed the firstborn in every house where the blood of a sacrificial
lamb hadn't been daubed on the doorposts. So says the Book."
"Praise the Book," said the rest of the Manni.
"Perhaps we should do likewise," the Manni spokesman went on. His voice
was calm, but a pulse beat wildly in his forehead. "Perhaps we should
turn these next thirty days into a festival of joy for the wee ones,
and then put them to sleep, and let their blood out upon the earth. Let
the Wolves take their corpses into the West, should they desire."
"You're insane," Benito Cash said, indignant and at the same time
almost laughing. "You and all your kind. We ain't gonna kill our
babbies!"
"Would the ones that come back not be better off dead?" the Manni
responded. "Great useless hulks! Scooped-out shells!"
"Aye, and what about their brothers and sisters?" asked Vaughn
Eisenhart. "For the Wolves only take one out of every two, as ye very
well know."
A second Manni rose, this one with a silky-white beard flowing down
over his breast. The first one sat down. The old man looked around at
the others, then at Tian. "You hold the feather, young fella--may I
speak?"
Tian nodded for him to go ahead. This wasn't a bad start at all. Let
them fully explore the box they were in, explore it all the way to the
corners. He was confident they'd see there were only two
alternatives, in the end: let the Wolves take one of every pair under
the age of puberty, as they always had, or stand and fight. But to see
that, they needed to understand that all other ways out were dead ends.
The old man spoke patiently. Sorrowfully, even. "To take those who
would have been left behind as well as those who'd come back to us
spoiled forever...aye, it's a terrible thing to consider. But
think'ee this, sais: if the Wolves were to come and find us
childless, they might leave us alone ever after."
"Aye, so they might," one of the smallhold farmers rumbled--Tian
believed his name was Jorge Estrada. "And so they might not. Manni-sai,
would you really kill a whole town's children for what might be?"
A strong rumble of agreement ran through the crowd. Another
smallholder, Garrett Strong, rose to his feet. His pug-dog's face was
truculent. His thumbs were hung in his belt. "Better we all kill
ourselves," he said. "Babbies and grown-ups alike."
The Manni didn't look outraged at this. Nor did any of the other
blue-cloaks around him. "It's an option," the old man said. "We would
speak of it if others would." He sat down.
"Not me," Garrett Strong said. "It'd be like cuttin off your damn
head to save shaving, hear me I beg."
There was laughter and a few cries of Hear you very well. Garrett sat
back down, looking a little less tense, and put his head together with
Vaughn Eisenhart. One of the other ranchers, Diego Adams, was listening
in, his black eyes intent.
Another smallholder rose--Bucky Javier. He had bright little blue eyes
in a small head that seemed to slope back from his goatee'd chin.
"What if we left for awhile?" he asked. "What if we took our children
and went back east? All the way to the Big River, mayhap?"
There was a moment of considering silence at this bold idea. The Big
River was almost all the way back to Mid-World...where, according to
Andy, a great palace of green glass had lately appeared and even more
lately disappeared again. Tian was about to respond himself when Eben
Took, the storekeeper's son, did it for him. Tian was relieved. He
hoped to be silent as long as possible. When they were talked out,
he'd tell them what was left.
"Are ye mad?" Eben asked. "Wolves'd come in, see us gone, and burn
all to the ground--farms and ranches, crops and stores, root and
branch. What would we come back to?"
"And what if they came after us?" Jorge Estrada chimed in. "Do'ee
think we'd be hard to follow, for such as the Wolves? They'd burn
us out as Took says, ride our backtrail, and take the kiddies anyway!"
Louder agreement. The stomp of shor'-boots on the plain pine
floorboards. And a few cries of Hear him, hear him!
"Besides," Neil Faraday said, standing and holding his vast and filthy
sombrero in front of him, "they never steal all our children." He spoke
in a frightened let's-be-reasonable tone that set Tian's teeth on
edge. It was this counsel he feared above all others. Its deadly-false
call to reason.
One of the Manni, this one younger and beardless, uttered a sharp and
contemptuous laugh. "Ah, one saved out of every two! And that make it
all right, does it? God bless thee!" He might have said more, but
White-Beard clamped a gnarled hand on the young man's arm. That
worthy said no more, but he didn't lower his head submissively,
either. His eyes were hot, his lips a thin white line.
"I don't mean it's right," Neil said. He had begun to spin his
sombrero in a way that made Tian feel a little dizzy. "But we have to
face the realities, don't we? Aye. And they don't take em all. Why
my daughter, Georgina, she's just as apt and canny--"
"Yar, and yer son George is a great empty-headed galoot," Ben Slightman
said. Slightman was Eisenhart's foreman, and he did not suffer fools
lightly. "I seen him settin on the steps in front of Tooky's when I
rode downstreet. Seen him very well. Him and some others equally
empty-brained."
"But--"
"I know," Slightman said. "You have a daughter who's as apt as an ant
and canny as the day is long. I give you every joy of her. I'm just
pointin out, like, that if not for the Wolves, you'd mayhap have a
son just as apt and canny. Nor would he eat a peck a day, winter and
summer, to no good end for ye, not even a brace o' grandbabbies."
Cries of Hear him and Say thankee as Ben Slightman sat down.
"They always leave us enough to go on with, don't they?" asked a
smallhold farmer whose place was just west of Tian's, near the edge
of the Calla. His name was Louis Haycox, and he spoke in a musing,
bitter tone of voice. Below his moustache, his lips curved in a smile
that didn't have much humor in it. "We won't kill our children," he
said, looking at the Manni. "All God's grace to ye, gentlemen, but I
don't believe even you could do so, came it right down to the
killin-floor. Or not all of ye. We can't pull up bag and baggage and
go east--or in any other direction--because we leave our farms behind.
They'd burn us out, all right, and come after the children just the
same. They need em, gods know why.
"It always comes back to the same thing: we're farmers, most of us.
Strong when our hands are in the soil, weak when they ain't. I got
two kiddies of my own, four years old, and I love em both well. Should
hate to lose either. But I'd give one to keep the other. And my
farm." Murmurs of agreement met this. "What other choice do we have? I
say this: it would be the world's worst mistake to anger the Wolves.
Unless, of course, we can stand against them. If t'were possible,
I'd stand. But I just don't see how it is."
Tian felt his heart shrivel with each of Haycox's words. How much of
his thunder had the man stolen? Gods and the Man Jesus!
Wayne Overholser got to his feet. He was Calla Bryn Sturgis's most
successful farmer, and had a vast sloping belly to prove it. "Hear me,
I beg."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured.
"Tell you what we're going to do," he said, looking around. "What we
always done, that's what. Do any of you want to talk about standing
against the Wolves? Are any of you that mad? With what? Spears and
rocks and a few bows? Maybe four rusty old soft-calibers like that?" He
jerked a thumb toward Eisenhart's rifle.
"Don't be making fun of my shooting-iron, son," Eisenhart said, but
he was smiling ruefully.
"They'll come and they'll take the children," Overholser said,
looking around. "Some of the children. Then they'll leave us alone
again for a generation or even longer. So it is, so it has been, and I
say leave it alone."
Disapproving rumbles rose at this, but Overholser waited them out.
"Twenty-three years or twenty-four, it don't matter," he said when
they were quiet again. "Either way it's a long time. A long time of
peace. Could be you've forgotten a few things, folks. One is that
children are like any other crop. God always sends more. I know that
sounds hard. But it's how we've lived and how we have to go on."
Tian didn't wait for any of the stock responses. If they went any
further down this road, any chance he might have to turn them would be
lost. He raised the opopanax feather and said, "Hear what I say! Would
ye hear, I beg!"
"Thankee-sai," they responded. Overholser was looking at Tian
distrustfully.
And you're right to look at me so, the farmer thought. For I've had
enough of such soft and cowardly common sense, so I have.
"Wayne Overholser is a smart man and a successful man," Tian said, "and
I hate to speak against his position for those reasons. And for
another, as well: he's old enough to be my Da'."
"'Ware he ain't your Da'," Garrett Strong's only
farmhand--Rossiter, his name was--called out, and there was general
laughter. Even Overholser smiled at this jest.
"Son, if ye truly hate to speak agin me, don't ye do it," he said. He
continued to smile, but only with his mouth.
"I must, though," Tian said. He began to walk slowly back and forth in
front of the benches. In his hands, the rusty-red plume of the opopanax
feather swayed. Tian raised his voice slightly so they'd understand
he was no longer speaking just to Overholser.
"I must because sai Overholser is old enough to be my Da'. His
children are grown, ye ken, and so far as I know there were only two to
begin with, one girl and one boy." He paused, then shot the killer.
"Born two years apart." Both singletons, in other words. Both safe from
the Wolves. The crowd murmured.
Overholser flushed a bright and dangerous red. "That's a rotten
goddamned thing to say! My get has nothing to do with this whether
single or double! Give me that feather, Jaffords. I got a few things to
say."
But the boots began to thump down on the boards, slowly at first, then
picking up speed until they rattled like hail. Overholser looked around
angrily, now so red he was nearly purple.
"I'd speak!" he shouted. "Would'ee not hear me, I beg?"
Cries of No, no and Not now and Jaffords has the feather and Sit and
listen came in response. Tian had an idea sai Overholser was
learning--and remarkably late in the game--that there was often a
deep-running resentment of a village's richest and most successful.
Those less fortunate or less canny might tug their hats off when the
rich folk passed in their buckboards or lowcoaches, they might send
thank-you delegations when the rich folk loaned their hired hands to
help with a house- or barn-raising, the well-to-do might be cheered at
Year End Gathering for helping to buy the piano that now sat in the
pavillion's musica. Yet the men of the Calla tromped their
shor'-boots to drown Overholser out with a certain savage
satisfaction. Even those who undoubtedly supported what he'd said
(Neil Faraday, for one) were tromping hard enough to break a sweat.
Overholser, unused to being balked in such a way--flabbergasted, in
fact--tried one more time. "I'd have the feather, do ye, I beg!"
"No," Tian said. "In your time, but not now."
There were actual cheers at this, mostly from the smallest of the
smallhold farmers and some of their hands. The Manni did not join in.
They were now drawn so tightly together that they looked like a dark
blue inkstain in the middle of the hall. They were clearly bewildered
by this turn. Vaughn Eisenhart and Diego Adams, meanwhile, moved to
flank Overholser and speak low to him.
You've got a chance, Tian thought. Better make the most of it.
He raised the feather and they quieted.
"Everyone will have a chance to speak," he said. "As for me, I say
this: we can't go on this way, simply bowing our necks and standing
quiet when the Wolves come and take our children. They--"
"They always return them," a hand named Farren Posella said timidly.
"They return husks!" Tian cried, and there were a few cries of Hear
him. Not enough, however, Tian judged. Not enough by far. Not yet. The
bulk of his work was yet to do.
He lowered his voice again--he did not want to harangue them.
Overholser had tried that and gotten nowhere, a thousand acres or not.
"They return husks. And what of us? What is this doing to us? Some
might say nothing, that the Wolves have always been a part of our life
in Calla Bryn Sturgis, like the occasional cyclone or earthshake. Yet
that is not true. They've been coming for six generations, at most.
But the Calla's been here a thousand years and more."
The old Manni with the bony shoulders and baleful eyes half-rose. "He
says true, folken. There were farmers here--and Manni-folk among
em--when the darkness in Thunderclap hadn't yet come, let alone the
Wolves."
They received this with looks of wonder. Their awe seemed to satisfy
the old man, who nodded and sat back down.
"So the Wolves are almost a new thing," Tian said. "Six times have they
come over mayhap a hundred and twenty or a hundred and forty years. Who
can say? For as ye ken, time has softened, somehow."
A low rumble. A few nods.
"In any case, once a generation," Tian went on. He was aware that a
hostile contingent was coalescing around Overholser, Eisenhart, and
Adams. These men he would not move even if he were gifted with the
tongue of an angel. Well, he could do without them, maybe. If he caught
the rest. "Once a generation they come, and how many children do they
take? Twelve? Eighteen? Maybe as many as thirty?
"Sai Overholser may not have babbies this time, but I do--not one set
of twins but two. Heddon and Hedda, Lyman and Lia. I love all four, but
in a month of days, two of them will be taken away. And when those two
come back, they'll be roont. Whatever spark there is that makes a
complete human being, it'll be out forever."
Hear him, hear him swept through the room like a sigh.
"How many of you have twins with no hair except that which grows on
their heads?" Tian demanded. "Raise yer hands!"
Six men raised their hands. Then eight. A dozen. Every time Tian began
to think they were done, another reluctant hand went up. In the end, he
counted twenty-two hands. He could see that Overholser was dismayed by
such a large count. Diego Adams had his hand raised, and Tian was
pleased to see he'd moved away a little bit from Overholser and
Eisenhart. Three of the Manni had their hands up. Jorge Estrada. Louis
Haycox. Many others he knew, which was not surprising, really; he knew
these men. Probably all of them except for a few wandering fellows
working smallhold farms for short wages and hot dinners.
"Each time they come and take our children, they take a little more of
of our hearts and our souls," Tian said.
"Oh come on, now, son," Eisenhart said. "That's laying it on a bit
th--"
"Shut up, Rancher," a voice said. It was shocking in its anger and
contempt. "He's got the feather. Let him speak out to the end."
Eisenhart whirled around, as if to mark who had spoken to him so. Only
bland faces looked back.
"Thankee sai," Tian said evenly. "I've almost come to the end. I keep
thinking of trees. Strong trees. You can strip the leaves of a strong
tree and it will live. Cut its bark with many names and it will live to
grow its skin over them again. You can even take from the heartwood and
it will live. But if you take of the heartwood again and again and
again, year after year, there will come a time when even the strongest
tree must die. I've seen it happen on my farm, and it's an ugly
thing. They die from the inside out. You can see it in the leaves as
they turn yellow from the trunk to the tips of the branches. And
that's what the Wolves are doing to this little village of ours. What
they're doing to our Calla."
"Hear him!" cried Freddy Rosario from the next farm over. "Hear him
very well!" Freddy had twins of his own, although they were still on
the tit and so probably safe.
"You say that if we stand and fight, they'll kill us all and burn the
Calla from west-border to east."
"Yes," Overholser said. "So I do say. Nor am I the only one." And from
all around him came rumbles of agreement.
"Yet each time we simply stand by with our heads lowered and our hands
open while the Wolves take what's dearer to us than any crop or house
or barn, they scoop a little more of the heart's wood from the tree
that is this village!" Tian spoke strongly, now standing still with the
feather raised high in one hand. "If we don't stand and fight soon,
we'll be dead, anyway! This is what I say, Tian Jaffords, son of
Alan! If we don't stand and fight soon, we'll be roont ourselves!"
Loud cries of Hear him! Exuberant stomping of shor'-boots. Even some
applause.
George Telford, another rancher, whispered briefly to Eisenhart and
Overholser. They listened, then nodded. Telford rose. He was
silver-haired, tanned, and handsome in the weatherbeaten way women
seemed to like.
"Had your say, son?" he asked kindly, as one might ask a child if he
had played enough for one afternoon and was ready for his nap.
"Yar, reckon," Tian said. He suddenly felt dispirited. Telford wasn't
a rancher on a scale with Vaughn Eisenhart, but he had a silver tongue.
Tian had an idea he was going to lose this, after all.
"May I have the feather, then?"
Tian thought of holding onto it, but what good would it do? He'd said
his best. He had an idea it wouldn't be good enough--not once Telford
got finished shredding his arguments with that smooth voice of his--but
he'd tried. Perhaps he and Zalia should pack up the kids and go out
east themselves. Moon to moon before the Wolves came, according to
Andy. A person could get a hell of a head start on trouble in thirty
days.
He passed the feather.
"We all appreciate young sai Jaffords's passion, and certainly no one
doubts his courage," George Telford was saying. He spoke with the
feather held against the left side of his chest, over his heart. His
eyes roved the audience, seeming to make eye contact--friendly eye
contact--with each man. "But we have to think of the kiddies who would
be left as well as those who would be taken, don't we? In fact, we
have to protect all the kiddies, whether they be twins, triplets, or
singletons like sai Jaffords's Aaron."
Telford turned to Tian now.
"What will you tell your children as the Wolves shoot their mother and
mayhap set their gran-pere on fire with one of their light-sticks? What
can you say to make the sound of those shrieks all right? To sweeten
the smell of burning skin and burning crops? That it's souls we're
a-saving? Or the heart's wood of some make-believe tree?"
He paused, giving Tian a chance to reply, but Tian had no reply to
make. He'd almost had them...but he'd left Telford out of his
reckoning. Smooth-voiced sonofabitch Telford, who was also far past the
age when he needed to be concerned about the Wolves calling into his
dooryard on their great gray horses.
Telford nodded, as if Tian's silence was no more than he expected,
and turned back to the benches. "When the Wolves come," he said,
"they'll come with fire-hurling weapons--the light-sticks, ye
ken--and guns, and flying metal things. I misremember the name of
those--"
"The drones," someone called.
"The sneetches," called someone else.
"Stealthies!" called a third.
Telford was nodding and smiling gently. A teacher with good pupils.
"Whatever they are, they fly through the air, seeking their targets,
and when they lock on, they put forth whirling blades as sharp as
razors. They can strip a man from top to toe in five seconds, leaving
nothing around him but a circle of blood and hair. So my own gran-pere
told me, and I have no reason not to believe it."
"Hear him, hear him well!" the men on the benches shouted. Their eyes
had grown huge and frightened.
"The Wolves themselves are terrible fearsome, so 'tis said," Telford
went on, moving smoothly from one campfire story to the next. "They
look sommat' like men, and yet they are not men but something bigger
and far more awful. And those they serve in far Thunderclap are more
terrible by far. Vampires, I've heard. Broken-helm undead ronin.
Warriors of the Scarlet Eye."
The men muttered. Even Tian felt a cold scamper of rat's paws up his
back at the mention of the Eye.
"So I've been told," Telford went on, "and while I don't believe it
all, I believe much. Never mind Thunderclap, though. Let's stick to
the Wolves. The Wolves are our problem, and problem enough. Especially
when they come armed to the teeth!" He shook his head, smiling grimly.
"What would we do? Perhaps we could knock them from their greathorses
with hoes, sai Jaffords? D'ee think?"
Derisive laughter greeted this.
"We have no weapons that can stand against them," Telford said. He was
now dry and businesslike, a man stating the bottom line. "Even if we
had such, we're farmers and ranchers and stockmen, not fighters.
We--"
"Stop that talk, Telford. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
Shocked gasps greeted this chilly pronouncement. There were cracking
backs and necks as men turned to see who had spoken. Slowly, then, as
if to give them exactly what they wanted, a white-haired figure in a
long black coat and a turned-around collar rose slowly from the bench
at the very back of the room. The scar on his forehead--it was in the
shape of a cross--was very bright in the light of the kerosene lamps.
It was the fellow who had slipped in unnoticed while the Manni elder
was going on about Aegypt and sacrificial lambs and the Angel of Death.
It was the Old Fella.
Telford recovered himself with relative speed, but when he spoke, Tian
thought he still looked shocked. "Beg pardon, Pere Callahan, but I have
the feather--"
"To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly
counsel," Pere Callahan said. He stepped into the aisle and began to
hobble down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis.
He wasn't as old as the Manni elder, nor nearly so old as Tian's
gran-pere (who claimed he was the oldest person not only here but in
Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than
both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the
haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his
foreheard (according to Zalia, it had been self-inflicted). More had to
do with the sound of him. Although he had been here long and
long--enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert
half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking--not even a stranger
would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was from here. His
alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure
slang he used ('street-jive," he called it). He had undoubtedly come
from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about,
although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his home.
He had been here since long before Tian Jaffords was born--since town
elders like Wayne Overholser and Vaughn Eisenhart had worn short
pants--and no one disputed his right to speak, with or without the
feather.
Younger than Tian's gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was
still the Old Fella.
4
Now he surveyed the men of Call Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at
George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford's hand. He sat down on
the first bench, still holding it.
Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and
no one needed to ask for an explanation.
"This is chickenshit."
He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a
moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept
his head up, but under the Old Fella's dry and bitter gaze, the
rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.
"Chickenshit," the man in the black coat and turned-around collar
repeated. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards
collar. On his forehead, that other cross--the one he'd supposedly
carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some
awful sin--glared under the lamps like a tattoo.
"This young man isn't one of my flock, but he's right, and I think
you all know it. You know it in your hearts. Even you, Mr. Overholser.
And you, George Telford."
"Know no such thing," Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped
of its former persuasive charm.
"All your lies will cross your eyes, that's what my mother would have
told you." Callahan offered Telford a thin smile Tian wouldn't have
wanted it pointed in his direction. And then Callahan did turn to him.
"I never heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy.
Thankee-sai."
Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He
felt like a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last
moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.
"I know a bit about cowardice," Callahan said, turning to the men on
the benches. "I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one
cowardly decision leads to another...and another...and another...until
it's too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I
assure you the tree of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not
make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your souls are in danger."
"Hail Mary, full of grace," said someone on the left side of the room,
"the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, J--"
"Bag it," Callahan snapped. "Save it for Sunday." His eyes, blue sparks
in their deep hollows, studied them. "For this night, never mind God
and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the sneetches and light-sticks
of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You're the men of the Calla,
are you not? Then act like men. Stop behaving like dogs crawling on
their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master."
Overholser went dark red at that, and began to stand. Diego Adams
grabbed his arm and spoke in his ear. For a moment Overholser remained
as he was, frozen in a kind of crouch, and then he sat back down. Adams
stood up.
"Sounds good, padrone," Adams said in his heavy accent. "Sounds brave.
Yet there are still a few questions, mayhap. Haycox asked one of em.
How can ranchers and farmers stand against armed killers out of the
west?"
"By hiring armed killers of our own," Callahan replied.
There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the
Old Fella had lapsed into another language. At last Diego Adams
said--cautiously, "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," the Old Fella said. "So listen and gain
wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen and gain wisdom. Not six
days' ride northeast of us, and bound southwest along the Path of the
Beam, come three gunslingers and one 'prentice." He smiled at their
amazement--their utter and complete amazement. Then he turned to Tian.
"The 'prentice isn't much older than your Heddon and Hedda, but
he's already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion. The
others are quicker and deadlier by far. You want hard calibers?
They're at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it."
This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned
as if with a fever. His great pod of a belly trembled. "What
children's goodnight story is this?" he asked. "If there ever were
such men, they passed out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been
dust in the wind for a thousand years."
There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any
kind. The crowd was still frozen, caught in the reverberation of that
one mythic word: gunslingers.
"You're wrong," Callahan said, "but we don't need to fight over it.
We can go and see for ourselves. A small party will do, I think.
Jaffords here...myself...and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?"
"There ain't no gunslingers!" Overholser roared.
Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. "Pere Callahan, God's grace on
you--"
"--and you, Jorge."
"--but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against
forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty
Wolves?"
"Hear him, he speaks sense!" Eben Took, the storekeeper's son, called
out.
"And why would they fight for us?" Estrada continued. "We make it from
year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few
hot meals? And what man agrees to die for his dinner?"
"Hear him, hear him!" Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in
unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.
The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: "I
have books in the Rectory. Half a dozen."
Although most of them knew this, the thought of books--all that
paper--still provoked a general sigh of wonder.
"According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward.
Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld."
"The Eld! The Eld!" the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into
the air with the first and fourth fingers raised. Hook em horns, the
Old Fella thought. Go, Texas. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the
smile that rose on his lips.
"Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?"
Telford asked in a gently mocking voice. "Surely you're too old for
such tales, Pere."
"Not hardcases," Callahan said patiently, "gunslingers."
"How do you know, Pere?" Tian heard himself ask. "And how can three men
stand against the Wolves?"
One of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need
to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to,
just the same). "I know because I know," he said. "As for how three may
stand against many--three and an apprentice, actually--that's a
question for their dinh. We'll ask him. And they wouldn't be
fighting just for their dinners, you know. Not at all."
"What else, then?" Bucky Javier asked.
Callahan knew they were there because he had seen them. He had seen
them because the thing under the church floor had awakened. They would
want the thing under the floor, and that was good because the Old
Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem's Lot in another
world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn't rid of it soon, it would
kill him.
Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.
"In time, Mr. Javier," Callahan said. "All in good time, sai."
Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along
the benches like from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.
Gunslingers.
Gunslingers to the east, come out of Mid-World.
And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld's last deadly children,
moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a
wind.
"Time to be men," Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his
forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without
compassion. "Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true."
Dark Tower V
by Stephen King
Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 04:27:23 -0800
--------
Part 1: ToDash -- Chapter I: The Face on the Water
ONE
Time is a face on the water. This was a proverb from the long-ago, in
far-off Mejis. Eddie Dean had never been there.
Except he had, in a way. Roland had carried all four of his
companions-Eddie, Susannah, Jake, Oy-to Mejis one night, storying
long as they camped on 1-70, the Kansas Turnpike in a Kansas that never
was. That night he had told them the story of Susan Delgado, his first
love. Perhaps his only love. And how he had lost her.
The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much
older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as
the world wound down like the mainspring in an ancient watch. Roland
had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass
could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might
be southwest tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise
begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty
hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which
Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there
would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness
bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if
time had gotten lost.
They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the
Mono. Blaine is a pain, Jake had said on several occasions, but he-or
it-turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the
Mono had been utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic ("Somethin
you're just naturally good at, sugar," Susannah told him), and they had
detrained in a Topeka which wasn't quite part of the world from which
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had come. Which was good, really, because
this world-one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team was called
The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese
car-maker was Takuro rather than Honda- had been overwhelmed by some
sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone. So stick that in
your Takuro Spirit and drive it, Eddie thought.
The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this.
During much of it he'd been scared shitless- he guessed all of them
had been, except maybe for Roland-but yes, it had seemed real and
clear. He'd not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even
when they'd been walking up 1-70 with bullets in their ears, looking at
the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a
thinny.
But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake's old
friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland's old friend (Flagg... or Marten...
or-just perhaps-Maerlyn), time had changed.
Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball... saw
Roland kill his mother by mistake... and when we came back...
Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing
perhaps thirty miles from the Green Palace. They had still been able to
see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world.
Someone-or some force-had carried them over or through the thinny
and back to the Path of the Beam. Whoever or whatever it had been, it
had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch,
complete with Nozz-A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of
Keebler cookies.
Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the
being Roland had just missed killing in the Palace: "Renounce the
Tower. This is your last warning." Ridiculous, really. Roland would no
more renounce the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and
then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce
Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the
end.
We got some daylight left, Eddie had said on the day they'd found
Flagg's warning note. You want to use it, or what?
Yes, Roland of Gilead had replied. Let's use it.
And so they had, following the Path of the Beam through endless open
fields that were divided from each other by belts of straggly, annoying
underbrush. There had been no sign of people. Skies had remained low
and cloudy day after day and night after night. Because they followed
the Path of the Beam, the clouds directly above them sometimes roiled
and broke open, revealing patches of blue, but never for long. One
night they opened long enough to disclose a full moon with a face
clearly visible on it: the nasty, complicitous squint-and-grin of the
Peddler. That made it late summer by Roland's reckoning, but to Eddie
it looked like half-past no time at all, the grass mostly listless or
outright dead, the trees (what few there were) bare, the bushes scrubby
and brown. There was little game, and for the first time in
weeks-since leaving the forest ruled by Shardik, the cyborg
bear-they sometimes went to bed with their bellies not quite full.
Yet none of that, Eddie thought, was quite as annoying as the sense of
having lost hold of time itself: no hours, no days, no weeks, no
seasons, for God's sake. The moon might have told Roland it was the end
of summer, but the world around them looked like the first week of
November, dozing sleepily toward winter.
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created
by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time
seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual
boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening,
time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney
Island. Weird but true.
Had everything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to
do but push Susannah's wheelchair through one boring field after
another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only
peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard's Glass
was what Jake called the Mystery Number, and that probably meant
nothing. They'd needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of
Lud in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the
Mystery Number was a holdover from that. Eddie was far from sure she
was right, but hey, it was a theory.
And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery
Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was
prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them
and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came
between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at
that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting
close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would
join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun
of his only real talent.
TWO
They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks
when they came to a pair of ancient double ruts that had surely once
been a road. It didn't follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland
swung them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their
purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a road again might refocus
things, help them to shake that maddening
becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes feeling, but it didn't. The road
carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They
finally topped a long north-south ridge. On the far side, their road
descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale wood, Eddie thought as
they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their
second day in the forest (or maybe it was the third day... or the
fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of vegetarian
gunslinger burritos, but there were no ores or trolls in the deep
glades, and no elves-Keebler or otherwise. No more deer, either.
"I keep lookin for the candy house," Eddie said. They'd been winding
their way through the great old trees for several days by then. Or
maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they
were still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it
in the sky... and they could feel it.
"What candy house is this?" Roland asked. "Is it another tale? If so,
I'd hear."
Of course he would. The man was a glutton for stories, especially those
that led off with a "Once upon a time when everyone lived in the
forest." But the way he listened was a little odd. A little off. Eddie
had mentioned this to Susannah once, and she'd nailed it with a single
stroke, as she often did. Susannah had a poet's almost uncanny ability
to put feelings into words, freezing them in place.
"That's 'cause he doesn't listen all big-eyed like a kid at bedtime,"
she said. "That's just how you want him to listen, honey-bunch."
"And how does he listen?"
"Like an anthropologist," she had replied promptly. "Like an
anthropologist tryin to figure out some strange culture by their myths
and legends."
She was right. And if Roland's way of listening made Eddie
uncomfortable, it was probably because in his heart, Eddie felt that if
anyone should be listening like scientists, it should be him and Suze
and Jake. Because they came from a far more sophisticated where and
when. Didn't they?
Whether they did or didn't, the four had discovered a great number of
stories that were common to both worlds. Roland knew a tale called
"Diana's Dream" that was eerily close to "The Lady or the Tiger," which
all three exiled New Yorkers had read in school. The tale of Lord Perth
was similar to the Bible story of David and Goliath. Roland had heard
many tales of the Man Jesus, who died on the cross to redeem the sins
of the world, and told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake that Jesus had His
fair share of followers in Mid-World. There were also songs common to
both worlds. "Careless Love" was one. "Hey Jude" was another, although
in Roland's world, the first line of this song was "Hey Jude, I see
you, lad."
Eddie passed at least an hour telling Roland the story of Hansel and
Gretel, turning the wicked child-eating witch into Rhea of the Coos
almost without thinking of it. When he got to the part about her trying
to fatten the children up, he broke off and asked Roland: "Do you know
this one? A version of this one?"
"No," Roland said, "but it's a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please."
Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after,
and the gunslinger nodded. "No one ever does live happily ever after,
but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don't we?"
"Yeah," Jake said.
Oy was trotting at the boy's heel, looking up at Jake with the usual
expression of calm adoration in his gold-ringed eyes. "Yeah," the
bumbler said, copying the boy's rather glum inflection exactly.
Eddie threw an arm around Jake's shoulders. "Too bad you're over here
instead of back in New York," he said. "If you were back in the Apple,
Jakey-boy, you'd probably have your own child psychiatrist by now.
You'd be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the
heart of your unresolved conflicts. Maybe getting some good drugs, too.
Ritalin, stuff like that."
"On the whole, I'd rather be here," Jake said, and looked down at Oy.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "I don't blame you."
"Such stories are called 'fairy tales,' " Roland mused.
"Yeah," Eddie replied.
"There were no fairies in this one, though."
"No," Eddie agreed. "That's more like a category name than anything
else. In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories... your
science fiction stories... your Westerns... your fairy tales. Get it?"
"Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one
story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?"
"I guess that's close enough," Susannah said.
"Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.
"Sometimes at supper, I guess," Eddie said, "but when it comes to
entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don't
let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds
kinda boring when you put it that way."
"How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?"
With no hesitation-and certainly no collusion-Eddie, Susannah, and
Jake all said the same word at exactly the same time: "Nineteen!" And a
moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: "Nineteen!"
They looked at each other and laughed, because "nineteen" had become a
kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing "bumhug," which Jake and
Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of
uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a
trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his
most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to
our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen. Both Susannah and Jake had
confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen
pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that
way, somehow.
Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the
wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky,
where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The
shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen.
Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.
Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie
had once believed in lightbulbs and Double-A batteries, had a tendency
to dismiss his ka-tet's odd and sudden infatuation with the number.
They had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so
their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had a tendency to spread
among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating
this to a certain degree.
"You've got the touch, Jake," he said. "I'm not sure that it's as
strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain, but by the gods I
believe it may be."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jake had replied, frowning in
puzzlement. Eddie did-sort of-and guessed that Jake would know, in
time. If time ever began passing in a normal way again, that was.
And on the day Jake brought the muffin-balls, it did.
THREE
They had stopped for lunch (more uninteresting vegetarian burritos, the
deer meat now gone and the Keebler cookies little more than a sweet
memory) when Eddie noticed that Jake was gone and asked the gunslinger
if he knew where the kid had gotten off to.
"Peeled off about half a wheel back," Roland said, and pointed along
the road with the two remaining fingers of his right hand. "He's all
right. If he wasn't, we'd all feel it." Roland looked at his burrito,
then took an unenthusiastic bite.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something else, but Susannah got there
first. "Here he is now. Hi there, sugar, what you got?"
Jake's arms were full of round things the size of tennis balls. Only
these balls would never bounce true; they had little horns sticking up
from them. When the kid got closer, Eddie could smell them, and the
smell was wonderful-like fresh-baked bread.
"I think these might be good to eat," Jake said. "They smell like the
fresh sourdough bread my mother and Mrs. Shaw-the housekeeper-got
at Zabar's." He looked at Susannah and Eddie, smiling a little. "Do you
guys know Zabar's?"
"I sure do," Susannah said. "Best of everything, mmm-hmmm. And they do
smell fine. You didn't eat any yet, did you?"
"No way." He looked questioningly at Roland.
The gunslinger ended the suspense by taking one, plucking off the
horns, and biting into what was left. "Muffin-balls," he said. "I
haven't seen any in gods know how long. They're wonderful." His blue
eyes were gleaming. "Don't want to eat the horns; they're not poison
but they're sour. We can fry them, if there's a little deerfat left.
That way they taste almost like meat."
"Sounds like a good idea," Eddie said. "Knock yourself out. As for me,
I think I'll skip the mushroom muff-divers, or whatever they are."
"They're not mushrooms at all," Roland said. "More like a kind of
ground berry."
Susannah took one, nibbled, then helped herself to a bigger bite. "You
don't want to skip these, sweetheart," she said. "My Daddy's friend,
Pop Mose, would have said 'These are prime.' " She took another of the
muffin-balls from Jake and ran a thumb over its silky surface.
"Maybe," he said, "but there was this book I read for a report back in
high school-I think it was called We Have Always Lived in the
Castle-where this nutty chick poisoned her whole family with things
like that." He bent toward Jake, raising his eyebrows and stretching
the corners of his mouth in what he hoped was a creepy smile. "Poisoned
her whole family and they died in AG-o-ny!"
Eddie fell off the log on which he had been sitting and began to roll
around on the needles and fallen leaves, making horrible faces and
choking sounds. Oy ran around him, yipping Eddie's name in a series of
high-pitched barks.
"Quit it," Roland said. "Where did you find these, Jake?"
"Back there," he said. "In a clearing I spotted from the path. It's
full of these things. Also, if you guys are hungry for meat... I know I
am... there's all kinds of sign. A lot of the scat's fresh." His eyes
searched Roland's face. "Very... fresh... scat." He spoke slowly, as if
to someone who wasn't fluent in the language.
A little smile played at the corners of Roland's mouth. "Speak quiet
but speak plain," he said. "What worries you, Jake?"
When Jake replied, his lips barely made the shapes of the words. "Men
watching me while I picked the muffin-balls." He paused, then added:
"They're watching us now."
Susannah took one of the muffin-balls, admired it, then dipped her face
as if to smell it like a flower. "Back the way we came? To the right of
the road?"
"Yes," Jake said.
Eddie raised a curled fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough, and
said: "How many?"
"I think four."
"Five," Roland said. "Possibly as many as six. One's a woman. Another a
boy not much older than Jake."
Jake looked at him, startled. Eddie said, "How long have they been
there?"
"Since yesterday," Roland said. "Cut in behind us from almost dead
east."
"And you didn't tell us?" Susannah asked. She spoke rather sternly, not
bothering to cover her mouth and obscure the shapes of the words.
Roland looked at her with the barest twinkle in his eye. "I was curious
as to which of you would smell them out first. Actually, I had my money
on you, Susannah."
She gave him a cool look and said nothing. Eddie thought there was more
than a little Detta Walker in that look, and was glad not to be on the
receiving end.
"What do we do about them?" Jake asked.
"For now, nothing," the gunslinger said.
Jake clearly didn't like this. "What if they're like Tick-Tock's katet?
Gasher and Hoots and those guys?"
"They're not."
"How do you know?'
"Because they would have set on us already and they'd be fly-food."
There seemed no good reply to that, and they took to the road again. It
wound through deep shadows, finding its way among trees that were
centuries old. Before they had been walking twenty minutes, Eddie heard
the sound of their pursuers (or shadowers): snapping twigs, rustling
underbrush, once even a low voice. Slewfeet, in Roland's terminology.
Eddie was disgusted with himself for remaining unaware of them for so
long. He also wondered what yon cullies did for a living. If it was
tracking and trapping, they weren't very good at it.
Eddie Dean had become a part of Mid-World in many ways, some so subde
he wasn't consciously aware of them, but he still thought of distances
in miles instead of wheels. He guessed they'd come about fifteen from
the spot where Jake rejoined them with his muffin-balls and his news
when Roland called it a day. They stopped in the middle of the road, as
they always did since entering the forest; that way the embers of their
campfire stood little chance of setting the woods on fire.
Eddie and Susannah gathered a nice selection of fallen branches while
Roland and Jake made a little camp and set about cutting up Jake's
trove of muffin-balls. Susannah rolled her wheelchair effortlessly over
the duff under the ancient trees, piling her selections in her lap.
Eddie walked nearby, humming under his breath.
"Lookit over to your left, sugar," Susannah said. He did, and saw a
distant orange blink. A fire. "Not very good, are they?" he asked. "No.
Truth is, I feel a little sorry for em."
"Any idea what they're up to?"
"Unh-unh, but I think Roland's right-they'll tell us when they're
ready. Either that or decide we're not what they want and just sort of
fade away. Come on, let's go back."
"Just a second." He picked up one more branch, hesitated, then took yet
another. Then it was right. "Okay," he said.
As they headed back, he counted the sticks he'd picked up, then the
ones in Susannah's lap. The total came to nineteen in each case.
"Suze," he said, and when she glanced over at him: "Time's started up
again."
She didn't ask him what he meant, only nodded.
FOUR
Eddie's resolution about not eating the muffin-balls didn't last long;
they just smelled too damned good sizzling in the lump of deerfat
Roland (thrifty, murderous soul that he was) had saved away in his
scuffed old purse. Eddie took his share on one of the ancient plates
they'd found in Shardik's woods and gobbled them.
"These are as good as lobster," he said, then remembered the monsters
on the beach that had eaten Roland's fingers. "As good as Nathan's
hotdogs is what I meant to say. And I'm sorry for teasing you, Jake."
"Don't worry about it," Jake said, smiling. "You never tease hard."
"One thing you should be aware of," Roland said. He was smiling-he
smiled more these days, quite a lot more-but his eyes were serious.
"All of you. Muffin-balls sometimes bring very lively dreams."
"You mean they make you stoned?" Jake asked, rather uneasily. He was
thinking of his father. Elmer Chambers had enjoyed many of the weirder
things in life.
"Stoned? I'm not sure I-"
"Buzzed. High. Seeing things. Like when you took the mescaline and went
into the stone circle where that thing almost... you know, almost hurt
me."
Roland paused for a moment, remembering. There had been a kind of
succubus imprisoned in that ring of stones. Left to its own devices,
she undoubtedly would have initiated Jake Chambers sexually, then
fucked him to death. As matters turned out, Roland had made it speak.
To punish him, it had sent him a vision of Susan Delgado.
"Roland?" Jake was looking at him anxiously.
"Don't concern yourself, Jake. There are mushrooms that do what you're
thinking of-change consciousness, heighten it-but not muffin-balls.
These are berries, just good to eat. If your dreams are particularly
vivid, just remind yourself you are dreaming."
Eddie thought this a very odd little speech. For one thing, it wasn't
like Roland to be so tenderly solicitous of their mental health. Not
like him to waste words, either.
Things have started again and he knows it, too, Eddie thought. There
was a little time-out there, but now the clock's running again. Game
on, as they say.
"We going to set a watch, Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Not by my warrant," the gunslinger said comfortably, and began rolling
himself a smoke.
"You really don't think they're dangerous, do you?" Susannah said, and
raised her eyes to the woods, where the individual trees were now
losing themselves in the general gloom of evening. The little spark of
campfire they'd noticed earlier was now gone, but the people following
them were still there. Susannah felt them. When she looked down at Oy
and saw him gazing in the same direction, she wasn't surprised.
"I think that may be their problem," Roland said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Eddie asked, but Roland would say no
more. He simply lay in the road with a rolled-up piece of deerskin
beneath his neck, looking up at the dark sky and smoking.
Later, Roland's ka-tet slept. They posted no watch and were
undisturbed.
FIVE
The dreams, when they came, were not dreams at all. They all knew this
except perhaps for Susannah, who in a very real sense was not there at
all that night.
My God, I'm back in New York, Eddie thought. And, on the heels of this:
Really back in New York. This is really happening.
It was. He was in New York. On Second Avenue.
That was when Jake and Oy came around the corner from Fifty-fourth
Street. "Hey, Eddie," Jake said, grinning. "Welcome home."
Game on, Eddie thought. Game on.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 05:16:17 -0800
--------
Chapter II: New York Groove
ONE
Jake fell asleep looking into pure darkness-no stars in that cloudy
night sky, no moon. As he drifted off, he had a sensation of falling
that he recognized with dismay: in his previous life as a so-called
normal child he'd often had dreams of falling, especially around exam
time, but these had ceased since his violent rebirth into Mid-World.
Then the falling feeling was gone. He heard a brief chiming melody that
was somehow too beautiful: three notes and you wanted it to stop, a
dozen and you thought it would kill you if it didn't. Each chime seemed
to make his bones vibrate. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it? he thought, for
although the chiming melody was nothing like the sinister warble of the
thinny, somehow it was.
It was.
Then, just when he truly believed he could bear it no longer, the
terrible, gorgeous tune stopped. The darkness behind his closed eyes
suddenly lit up a brilliant dark red.
He opened them cautiously on strong sunlight.
And gaped.
At New York.
Taxis bustled past, gleaming bright yellow in the sunshine. A young
black man wearing Walkman earphones strolled by Jake, bopping his
sandaled feet a little bit to the music and going "Cha-da-ba,
cha-da-fcow!" under his breath. A jackhammer battered Jake's eardrums.
Chunks of cement dropped into a dumptruck with a crash that echoed from
one cliff-face of buildings to another. The world was a-din with
racket. He had gotten used to the deep silences of Mid-World without
even realizing it. No, more. Had come to love them. Still, this noise
and bustle had its attractions, and Jake couldn't deny it. Back in the
New York groove. He felt a little grin stretch his lips.
"Ake! Ake!" cried a low, rather distressed voice. Jake looked down and
saw Oy sitting on the sidewalk with his tail curled neatly around him.
The billy-bumbler wasn't wearing little red booties and Jake wasn't
wearing the red Oxfords (thank God), but this was still very like their
visit to Roland's Gilead, which they had reached by traveling in the
pink Wizard's Glass. The glass ball that had caused so much trouble and
woe.
No glass this time... he'd just gone to sleep. But this was no dream.
It was more intense than any dream he'd ever had, and more textured.
Also...
Also, people kept detouring around him and Oy as they stood to the left
of a midtown saloon called Kansas City Blues. While Jake was making
this observation, a woman actually stepped over Oy, hitching up her
straight black skirt a bit at the knee in order to do so. Her
preoccupied face {I'm just one more New Yorker minding my business, so
don't screw with mewss what that face said to Jake) never changed.
They don't see us, but somehow they sense us. And if they can sense us,
we must really be here.
The first logical question was Why? Jake considered this for a moment,
then decided to table it. He had an idea the answer would come.
Meantime, why not enjoy New York while he had it?
"Come on, Oy," he said, and walked around the corner. The
billy-bumbler, clearly no city boy, walked so close to him that
Jake could feel his breath feathering against his ankle.
Second Avenue, he thought. Then: My God-
Before he could finish the thought, he saw Eddie Dean standing outside
of the Barcelona Luggage store, looking dazed and more than a little
out of place in old jeans, a deerskin shirt, and deerskin moccasins.
His hair was clean, but it hung to his shoulders in a way that
suggested no professional had seen to it in quite some time. Jake
realized he himself didn't look much better; he was also wearing a
deerskin shirt and, on his lower half, the battered remains of the
Dockers he'd had on the day he left home for good, setting sail for
Brooklyn, Dutch Hill, and another world.
Good thing no one can see us, Jake thought, then decided that wasn't
true. If people could see them, they'd probably get rich on spare
change before noon. The thought made him grin. "Hey, Eddie," he said.
"Welcome home."
Eddie nodded, looking bemused. "See you brought your friend."
Jake reached down and gave Oy an affectionate pat. "He's my version of
the American Express Card. I don't go home without him."
Jake was about to go on-he felt witty, bubbly, full of amusing things
to say-when someone came around the corner, passed them without
looking (as everyone else had), and changed everything. It was a kid
wearing Dockers that looked like Jake's because they were Jake's. Not
the pair he had on now, but they were his, all right. So were the
sneakers. They were the ones Jake had lost in Dutch Hill. The
plaster-man who guarded the door between the worlds had torn them right
off his feet.
The boy who had just passed them was John Chambers, it was him, only
this version looked soft and innocent and painfully young. How did you
survive? he asked his own retreating back. How did you survive the
mental stress of losing your mind, and running away from home, and that
horrible house in Brooklyn ? Most of all, how did you survive the
doorkeeper? You must be tougher than you look.
Eddie did a doubletake so comical that Jake laughed in spite of his own
shocked surprise. It made him think of those comic-book panels where
Archie or Jughead is trying to look in two directions at the same time.
He looked down and saw a similar expression on Oy's face. Somehow
that made the whole thing even funnier.
"What the fuck?" Eddie asked.
"Instant replay," Jake said, and laughed harder. It came out sounding
goofy as shit, but he didn't care. He felt goofy. "It's like when we
watched Roland in the Great Hall of Gilead, only this is New York and
it's May 31st, 1977! It's the day I took French Leave from Piper!
Instant replay, baby!"
"French-?" Eddie began, but Jake didn't give him a chance to finish.
He was struck by another realization. Except struck was too mild a
word. He was buried by it, like a man who just happens to be on the
beach when a tidal wave rolls in. His face blazed so brightly that
Eddie actually took a step back.
"The rose!" he whispered. He felt too weak in the diaphragm to speak
any louder, and his throat was as dry as a sandstorm. "Eddie, the
rose!"
"What about it?"
"This is the day I see it!" He reached out and touched Eddie's forearm
with a trembling hand. "I go to the bookstore... then to the vacant
lot. I think there used to be a delicatessen-"
Eddie was nodding and beginning to look excited himself. "Tom and
Jerry's Artistic Deli, corner of Second and Forty-sixth-"
"The deli's gone but the rose is there! That me walking down the street
is going to see it, and we can see it, too!"
At that, Eddie's own eyes blazed. "Come on, then," he said. "We don't
want to lose you. Him. Whoever the fuck."
"Don't worry," Jake said. "I know where he's going."
TWO
The Jake ahead of them-New York Jake, spring-of-1977 Jake- walked
slowly, looking everywhere, clearly digging the day. Mid-World Jake
remembered exactly how that boy had felt: the sudden relief when the
arguing voices in his mind
(I died!) (I didn't!)
had finally stopped their squabbling. Back by the board fence that had
been, where the two businessmen had been playing tic-tac-toe with a
Mark Cross pen. And, of course, there had been the relief of being away
from the Piper School and the insanity of his Final Essay for Ms.
Avery's English class. The Final Essay counted a full twenty-five per
cent toward each student's final grade, Ms. Avery had made that
perfectly clear, and Jake's had been gibberish. The fact that his
teacher had later given him an A+ on it didn't change that, only made
it clear that it wasn't just him; the whole world was losing its shit,
going nineteen.
Being out from under all that-even for a little while-had been
great. Of course he was digging the day.
Only the day's not quite right, Jake thought-the Jake walking along
behind his old self. Something about it...
He looked around but couldn't figure it out. Late May, bright summer
sun, lots of strollers and window-shoppers on Second Avenue, plenty of
taxis, the occasional long black limo; nothing wrong with any of this.
Except there was.
Everything was wrong with it.
THREE
Eddie felt the kid twitch his sleeve. "What's wrong with this picture?"
Jake asked.
Eddie looked around. In spite of his own adjustment problems (his
involved coming back to a New York that was clearly a few years behind
his when), he knew what Jake meant. Something was wrong.
He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn't have a
shadow. They'd lost their shadows like the kids in one of the
stories... one of the nineteen fairy tales... or was it maybe something
newer, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or Peter Pan? One of
what might be called the Modern Nineteen?
Didn't matter in any case, because their shadows were there.
Shouldn't be, though, Eddie thought. Shouldn't be able to see our
shadows when it's this dark.
Stupid thought. It wasn't dark. It was morning, for Christ's sake, a
bright May morning, sunshine winking off the chrome of passing cars and
the windows of the stores on the east side of Second Avenue brightly
enough to make you squint your eyes. Yet still it seemed somehow dark
to Eddie, as if all this were nothing but fragile surface, like the
canvas backdrop of a stage set. "At rise we see the Forest of Arden."
Or a Castle in Denmark. Or the Kitchen of Willy Loman's House. In this
case we see Second Avenue, midtown New York.
Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn't find the workshop
and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some
vast dead universe where Roland's Tower had already fallen.
Please let me be wrong, Eddie thought. Please let this just be a case
of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies.
He didn't think it was.
"How'd we get here?" he asked Jake. "There was no door..." He trailed
off, and then asked with some hope: "Maybe it is a dream?"
"No," Jake said. "It's more like when we traveled in the Wizard's
Glass. Except this time there was no ball." A thought struck him. "Did
you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?"
Eddie nodded. "It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water."
"Right," Jake said. "Exactly."
Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy
lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already
crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake-Kid
Seventy-seven-was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To
Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see
the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York
Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your
Bloomingdale's charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the
kid easy to follow.
And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.
"Where'd you go? Christ, where'd you go?"
"Relax," Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents' worth:
"Ax!") The kid was grinning. "I just went into the bookstore. The...
um... Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it's called."
"Where you got Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book?"
"Right."
Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his
whole face. "Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the
owner's name?"
Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind was a
fellow named Calvin Tower.
"Hurry up," Jake said. "I want to watch."
Eddie didn't have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.
FOUR
Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn't fade,
exactly, but it faltered.
"What is it?" Eddie asked. "What's wrong?"
"Dunno. Something's different, I think. It's just... so much has
happened since I was here..."
He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was
actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of
thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.
TODAY'S SPECIALS
>From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner
Hardcovers Market Price Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each
>From Maine! Chilled Stephen King
Hardcovers Market Price
Book Club Bargains
Paperbacks 75c each
>From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler
Hardcovers Market Price
Paperbacks 7 for $5.00
Eddie looked beyond this and saw that other Jake-the one without the
tan or the look of hard clarity in his eyes- standing at a small
display table. Kiddie books. Probably both the Nineteen Fairy Tales and
the Modern Nineteen.
Quit it, he told himself. That's obsessive-compulsive crap and you know
it.
Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase
from that table which had gone on to change-and very likely to
save-their lives. He'd worry about the number nineteen later. Or not
at all, if he could manage it.
"Come on," he told Jake. "Let's go in."
The boy hung back.
"What's the matter?" Eddie asked. "Tower won't be able to see us, if
that's what you're worried about."
" Tower won't be able to," Jake said, "but what if he can?" He pointed
at his other self, the one who had yet to meet Gasher and Tick-Tock and
the old people of River Crossing. The one who had yet to meet Blaine
the Mono and Rhea of the Coos.
Jake was looking at Eddie with a kind of haunted curiosity. "What if I
see myself?"
Eddie supposed that might really happen. Hell, anything might happen.
But that didn't change what he felt in his heart. "I think we're
supposed to go in, Jake."
"Yeah..." It came out in a long sigh. "I do, too."
FIVE
They went in and they weren't seen and Eddie was relieved to count
twenty-one books on the display table that had attracted the boy's
notice. Except, of course, when Jake picked up the two he
wanted-Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book-that left
nineteen.
"Find something, son?" a mild voice inquired. It was a fat fellow in an
open-throated white shirt. Behind him, at a counter that looked as if
it might have been filched from a turn-of-the-century soda fountain, a
trio of old guys were drinking coffee and nibbling pastries. A
chessboard with a game in progress sat on the marble counter.
"The guy sitting on the end is Aaron Deepneau," Jake whispered. "He's
going to explain the riddle about Samson to me."
"Shh!" Eddie said. He wanted to hear the conversation between Calvin
Tower and Kid Seventy-seven. All of a sudden that seemed very
important... only why was it so fucking dark in here?
Except it's not dark at all. The east side of the street gets plenty of
sun at this hour, and with the door open, this place is getting all of
it. How can you say it's dark ?
Because it somehow was. The sunlight-the contrast of the
sunlight-only made it worse. The fact that you couldn't exactly see
that darkness made it worse still... and Eddie realized a terrible
thing: these people were in danger. Tower, Deepneau, Kid Seventy-seven.
Probably him and Mid-World Jake and Oy, as well.
All of them.
SIX
Jake watched his other, younger self take a step back from the bookshop
owner, his eyes widening in surprise. Because his name is Tower, Jake
thought. That's what surprised me. Not because of Roland's Tower,
though- I didn't know about that yet-but because of the picture I
put on the last page of my Final Essay.
He had pasted a photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on the last page,
then had scribbled all over it with a black Crayola, darkening it as
best he could.
Tower asked him his name. Seventy-seven Jake told him and Tower joked
around with him a little. It was good joking-around, the kind you got
from adults who really didn't mind kids.
"Good handle, pard," Tower was saying. "Sounds like the footloose hero
in a Western novel-the guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans
up the town, and then travels on. Something by Wayne D. Overholser,
maybe..."
Jake took a step closer to his old self (part of him was thinking what
a wonderful sketch all this would make on Saturday Night Live), and his
eyes widened slightly. "Eddie!" He was still whispering, although he
knew the people in the bookstore couldn't-
Except maybe on some level they could. He remembered the lady back on
Fifty-fourth Street, twitching her skirt up at the knee so she could
step over Oy. And now Calvin Tower's eyes shifted slightly in his
direction before going back to the other version of him.
"Might be good not to attract unnecessary attention," Eddie muttered in
his ear.
"I know," Jake said, "but look at Charlie the Choo-Choo, Eddie!"
Eddie did, and for a moment saw nothing-except for Charlie himself,
of course: Charlie with his headlight eye and not-quite-trustworthy
cowcatcher grin. Then Eddie's eyebrows went up.
"I thought Charlie the Choo-Choo was written by a lady named Beryl
Evans," he whispered.
Jake nodded. "I did, too."
"Then who's this-" Eddie took another look. "Who's this Claudia y
Inez Bachman?"
"I have no idea," Jake said. "I never heard of her in my life."
SEVEN
One of the old men at the counter came sauntering toward them. Eddie
and Jake drew away. As they stepped back, Eddie's spine gave a cold
little wrench. Jake was very pale, and Oy was giving out a series of
low, distressed whines. Something was wrong here, all right. In a way
they had lost their shadows. Eddie just didn't know how.
Kid Seventy-seven had taken out his wallet and was paying for the two
books. There was some more talk and good-natured laughter, then he
headed for the door. When Eddie started after him, Mid-World Jake
grabbed his arm. "No, not yet-I come back in."
"I don't care if you alphabetize the whole place," Eddie said. "Let's
wait out on the sidewalk."
Jake thought about this, biting his lip, then nodded. They headed for
the door, then stopped and moved aside as the other Jake returned. The
riddle book was open. Calvin Tower had lumbered over to the chessboard
on the counter. He looked around with an amiable smile.
"Change your mind about that cup of coffee, O Hyperborean Wanderer?"
"No, I wanted to ask you-"
"This is the part about Samson's Riddle," Mid-World Jake said. "I don't
think it matters. Although the Deepneau guy sings a pretty good song,
if you want to hear it."
"I'll pass," Eddie said. "Come on."
They went out. And although things on Second Avenue were still
wrong-that sense of endless dark behind the scenes, behind the very
sky-it was somehow better than in The Manhattan Restaurant of the
Mind. At least there was fresh air.
"Tell you what," Jake said. "Let's go down to Second and Forty-sixth
right now." He jerked his head toward the version of him listening to
Aaron Deepneau sing. "I'll catch up with us."
Eddie considered it, then shook his head.
Jake's face fell a little. "Don't you want to see the rose?"
"You bet your ass I do," Eddie said. "I'm wild to see it."
"Then-"
"I don't feel like we're done here yet. I don't know why, but I don't."
Jake-the Kid Seventy-seven version of him-had left the door open
when he went back inside, and now Eddie moved into it. Aaron Deepneau
was telling Jake a riddle they would later try on Blaine the Mono: What
can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks. Mid-World Jake,
meanwhile, was once more looking at the notice-board in the bookstore
window
(Pan-Fried William Faulkner, Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler). He wore a
frown of the kind that expresses doubt and anxiety rather than ill
temper.
"That sign's different, too," he said.
"How?"
"I can't remember."
"Is it important?"
Jake turned to him. The eyes below the furrowed brow were haunted. "I
don't know. It's another riddle. I hate riddles!"
Eddie sympathized. When is a Beryl not a Beryl? "When it's a Claudia,"
he said.
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Better step back, Jake, or you're going to run into
yourself."
Jake gave the oncoming version of John Chambers a startled glance, then
did as Eddie suggested. And when Kid Seventy-seven started on down
Second Avenue with his new books in his left hand, Mid-World Jake gave
Eddie a tired smile. "I do remember one thing," he said. "When I left
this bookstore, I was sure I'd never come here again. But I did."
"Considering that we're more ghosts than people, I'd say that's
debatable." Eddie gave the back of Jake's neck a friendly scruff. "And
if you have forgotten something important, Roland might be able to help
you remember. He's good at that."
Jake grinned at this, relieved. He knew from personal experience that
the gunslinger really was good at helping people remember. Roland's
friend Alain might have been the one with the strongest ability to
touch other minds, and his friend Cuthbert had gotten all the sense of
humor in that particular ka-tet, but Roland had developed over the
years into one hell of a hypnotist. He could have made a fortune in Las
Vegas.
"Can we follow me now?" Jake asked. "Check out the rose?" He looked up
and down Second Avenue-a street that was somehow bright and dark at
the same time-with a kind of unhappy perplexity. "Things are probably
better there. The rose makes everything better."
Eddie was about to say okay when a dark gray Lincoln Town Car pulled up
in front of Calvin Tower's bookshop. It parked by the yellow curb in
front of a fire hydrant with absolutely no hesitation. The front doors
opened, and when Eddie saw who was getting out from behind the wheel,
he seized Jake's shoulder.
"Ow!"Jake said. "Man, that hurts!"
Eddie paid no attention. In fact the hand on Jake's shoulder clamped
down even tighter.
"Christ," Eddie whispered. "Dear Jesus Christ, what's this? What in
hell is this?"
EIGHT
Jake watched Eddie go past pale to ashy gray. His eyes were bulging
from their sockets. Not without difficulty, Jake pried the clamping
hand off his shoulder. Eddie made as if to point with that hand, but
didn't seem to have the strength. It fell against the side of his leg
with a little thump.
The man who had gotten out on the passenger side of the Town Car walked
around to the sidewalk while the driver opened the rear curbside door.
Even to Jake their moves looked practiced, almost like steps in a
dance. The man who got out of the back seat was wearing an expensive
suit, but that didn't change the fact that he was basically a dumpy
little guy with a potbelly and black hair going gray around the edges.
Dandrufjy black hair, from the look of his suit's shoulders.
To Jake, the day suddenly felt darker than ever. He looked up to see if
the sun had gone behind a cloud. It hadn't, but it almost seemed to him
that there was a black corona forming around its brilliant circle, like
a ring of mascara around a startled eye.
Half a block farther downtown, the 1977 version of him was glancing in
the window of a restaurant, and Jake could remember the name of it:
Chew Chew Mama's. Not far beyond it was Tower of Power Records, where
he would think Towers are selling cheap today. If that version of him
had looked back, he would have seen the gray Town Car... but he hadn't.
Kid Seventy-seven's mind was fixed firmly on the future.
"It's Balazar," Eddie said.
"What?"
Eddie was pointing at the dumpy guy, who had paused to adjust his Sulka
tie. The other two now stood flanking him. They looked simultaneously
relaxed and watchful.
"Enrico Balazar. And looking much younger. God, he's almost
middle-aged!"
"It's 1977," Jake reminded him. Then, as the penny dropped: "That's the
guy you and Roland killed?" Eddie had told Jake the story of the
shoot-out at Balazar's club in 1987, leaving out the gorier parts. The
part, for instance, where Kevin Blake had lobbed the head of Eddie's
brother into Balazar's office in an effort to flush Eddie and Roland
into the open. Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "The guy Roland and I killed. And the one who was
driving, that's Jack Andolini. Old Double-Ugly, people used to call
him, although never to his face. He went through one of those doors
with me just before the shooting started."
"Roland killed him, too. Didn't he?"
Eddie nodded. It was simpler than trying to explain how Jack Andolini
had happened to the blind and faceless beneath the tearing claws and
ripping jaws of the lobstrosities on the beach.
"The other bodyguard's George Biondi. Big Nose. I killed him myself.
Will kill him. Ten years from now." Eddie looked as if he might faint
at any second.
"Eddie, are you okay?"
"I guess so. I guess I have to be." They had drawn away from the
bookshop's doorway. Oy was still crouched at Jake's ankle. Down Second
Avenue, Jake's other, earlier self had disappeared. I'm running by
now, Jake thought. Maybe jumping over the UPS guy's dolly. Sprinting
all-out for the delicatessen, because I'm sure that's the way back to
Mid-World. The way back to him.
Balazar peered at his reflection in the window beside the today's
specials display-board, gave the wings of hair above his ears one last
little fluff with the tips of his fingers, then stepped through the
open door. Andolini and Biondi followed.
"Hard guys," Jake said.
"The hardest," Eddie agreed.
"From Brooklyn."
"Well, yeah."
"Why are hard guys from Brooklyn visiting a used-book store in
Manhattan?"
"I think that's what we're here to find out. Jake, did I hurt your
shoulder?"
"I'm okay. But I don't really want to go back in there."
"Neither do I. So let's go."
They went back into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.
NINE
Oy was still at Jake's heel and still whining. Jake wasn't crazy about
the sound, but he understood it. The smell of fear in the bookstore was
palpable. Deepneau sat beside the chessboard, gazing unhappily at
Calvin Tower and the newcomers, who didn't look much like bibliophiles
in search of the elusive signed first edition. The other two old guys
at the counter were drinking the last of their coffee in big gulps,
with the air of fellows who have just remembered important appointments
elsewhere.
Cowards, Jake thought with a contempt he didn't recognize as a
relatively new thing in his life. Lowbellies. Being old forgives some
of it, but not all of it.
"We just have a couple of things to discuss, Mr. Toren," Balazar was
saying. He spoke in a low, calm, reasonable voice, without even a trace
of accent. "Please, if we could step back into your office-"
"We don't have business," Tower said. His eyes kept drifting to
Andolini. Jake supposed he knew why. Jack Andolini looked the
ax-wielding psycho in a horror movie. "Come July fifteenth, we might
have business. Might. So we could talk after the Fourth. I guess. If
you wanted to." He smiled to show he was being reasonable. "But now?
Gee, I just don't see the point. It's not even June yet. And for your
information my name's not-"
"He doesn't see the point," Balazar said. He looked at Andolini; looked
at the one with the big nose; raised his hands to his shoulders, then
dropped them. What's wrong with this world of ours? the gesture said.
"Jack? George? This man took a check from me-the amount before the
decimal point was a one followed by five zeroes-and now he says he
doesn't see the point of talking to me."
"Unbelievable," Biondi said. Andolini said nothing. He simply looked at
Calvin Tower, muddy brown eyes peering out from beneath the unlovely
bulge of his skull like mean little animals peering out of a cave. With
a face like that, Jake supposed, you didn't have to talk much to get
your point across. The point being intimidation.
"I want to talk to you," Balazar said. He spoke in a patient,
reasonable tone of voice, but his eyes were fixed on Tower's face with
a terrible intensity. "Why? Because my employers in this matter want me
to talk to you. That's good enough for me. And do you know what? I
think you can afford five minutes of chitchat for your hundred grand.
Don't you?"
"The hundred thousand is gone," Tower said bleakly. "As I'm sure you
and whoever hired you must know."
"That's of no concern to me," Balazar said. "Why would it be? It was
your money. What concerns me is whether or not you're going to take us
out back. If not, we'll have to have our conversation right here, in
front of the whole world."
The whole world now consisted of Aaron Deepneau, one billy-bumbler, and
a couple of expatriate New Yorkers none of the men in the bookstore
could see. Deepneau's counter-buddies had run like the lowbellies they
were.
Tower made one last try. "I don't have anyone to mind the store.
Lunch-hour is coming up, and we often have quite a few browsers
during-"
"This place doesn't do fifty dollars a day," Andolini said, "and we all
know it, Mr. Toren. If you're really worried you're going to miss a big
sale, let him run the cash register for a few minutes."
For one horrible second, Jake thought the one Eddie had called "Old
Double-Ugly" meant none other than John "Jake" Chambers. Then he
realized Andolini was pointing past him, at Deepneau.
Tower gave in. Or Toren. "Aaron?" he asked. "Do you mind?"
"Not if you don't," Deepneau said. He looked troubled. "Sure you want
to talk with these guys?"
Biondi gave him a look. Jake thought Deepneau stood up under it
remarkably well. In a weird way, he felt proud of the old guy.
"Yeah," Tower said. "Yeah, it's fine."
"Don't worry, he won't lose his butthole virginity on our account,"
Biondi said, and laughed.
"Watch your mouth, you're in a place of scholarship," Balazar said, but
Jake thought he smiled a little. "Come on, Toren. Just a little chat."
"That's not my name! I had it legally changed on-"
"Whatever," Balazar said soothingly. He actually patted Tower's arm.
Jake was still trying to get used to the idea that all this... all this
melodrama. . . had happened after he'd left the store with his two new
books (new to him, anyway) and resumed his journey. That it had all
happened behind his back.
"A squarehead's always a squarehead, right, boss?" Biondi asked
jovially. "Just a Dutchman. Don't matter what he calls himself."
Balazar said, "If I want you to talk, George, I'll tell you what I want
you to say. Have you got that?"
"Okay," Biondi said. Then, perhaps after deciding that didn't sound
quite enthusiastic enough: "Yeah! Sure."
"Good." Balazar, now holding the arm he had patted, guided Tower toward
the back of the shop. Books were piled helter-skelter here; the air was
heavy with the scent of a million musty pages. There was a door marked
employees only. Tower produced a ring of keys, and they jingled
slightly as he picked through them.
"His hands are shaking," Jake murmured.
Eddie nodded. "Mine would be, too."
Tower found the key he wanted, turned it in the lock, opened the door.
He took another look at the three men who had come to visit him-hard
guys from Brooklyn-then led them into the back room. The door closed
behind them, and Jake heard the sound of a bolt being shot across. He
doubted Tower himself had done that.
Jake looked up into the convex anti-shoplifting mirror mounted in the
corner of the shop, saw Deepneau pick up the telephone beside the cash
register, consider it, then put it down again.
"What do we do now?" Jake asked Eddie.
"I'm gonna try something," Eddie said. "I saw it in a movie once." He
stood in front of the closed door, then tipped Jake a wink. "Here I go.
If I don't do anything but bump my head, feel free to call me an
asshole."
Before Jake could ask him what he was talking about, Eddie walked into
the door. Jake saw his eyes close and his mouth tighten in a grimace.
It was the expression of a man who expects to take a hard knock.
Only there was no hard knock. Eddie simply passed through the door. For
one moment his moccasin-clad foot was sticking out, and then it went
through, too. There was a low rasping sound, like a hand being passed
over rough wood.
Jake bent down and picked Oy up. "Close your eyes," he said.
"Eyes," the bumbler agreed, but continued to look at Jake with that
expression of calm adoration. Jake closed his own eyes, squinting them
shut When he opened them again, Oy was mimicking him. Without wasting
any time, Jake walked into the door with the employees only sign on it.
There was a moment of darkness and the smell of wood. Deep in his head,
he heard a couple of those disturbing chimes again. Then he was
through.
TEN
It was a storage area much bigger than Jake had expected- almost as
big as a warehouse and stacked high with books in every direction. He
guessed that some of those stacks, held in place by pairs of upright
beams that provided shoring rather than shelving, had to be fourteen or
sixteen feet high. Narrow, crooked aisles ran between them. In a couple
he saw rolling platforms that made him think of the portable boarding
ramps you saw in smaller airports. The smell of old books was the same
back here as in front, but ever so much stronger, almost
overwhelming. Above them hung a scattering of shaded lamps that
provided yellowish, uneven illumination. The shadows of Tower, Balazar,
and Balazar's friends leaped grotesquely on the wall to their left.
Tower turned that way, leading his visitors to a corner that really was
an office: there was a desk with a typewriter and a Rolodex on it,
three old filing cabinets, and a wall covered with various pieces of
paperwork. There was a calendar with some nineteenth-century guy on the
May sheet Jake didn't recognize... and then he did. Robert Browning.
Jake had quoted him in his Final Essay.
Tower sat down in the chair behind his desk, and immediately seemed
sorry he'd done that. Jake could sympathize. The way the other three
crowded around him couldn't have been very pleasant. Their shadows
jumped up the wall behind the desk like the shadows of gargoyles.
Balazar reached into his suitcoat and brought out a folded sheet of
paper. He opened it and put it down on Tower's desk. "Recognize this?"
Eddie moved forward. Jake grabbed at him. "Don't go close! They'll
sense you!"
"I don't care," Eddie said. "I need to see that paper."
Jake followed, not knowing what else to do. Oy stirred in his arms and
whined. Jake shushed him curtly, and Oy blinked. "Sorry, buddy," Jake
said, "but you have to keep quiet."
Was the 1977 version of him in the vacant lot yet? Once inside it, that
earlier Jake had slipped somehow and knocked himself unconscious. Had
that happened yet? No sense wondering. Eddie was right. Jake didn't
like it, but he knew it was true: they were supposed to be here, not
there, and they were supposed to see the paper Balazar was now showing
Calvin Tower.
ELEVEN
Eddie got the first couple of lines before Jack Andolini said, "Boss, I
don't like this. Something feels hinky."
Balazar nodded. "I agree. Is someone back here with us, Mr. Toren?" He
still sounded calm and courteous, but his eyes were everywhere,
assessing this large room's potential for concealment.
"No," Tower said. "Well, there's Sergio; he's the shop cat. I imagine
he's back here somew-"
"This ain't no shop," Biondi said, "it's a hole you pour money into.
One of those chi-chi designers'd have trouble making enough to cover
the overhead on a joint this big, and a bookstore? Man, who are you
kidding?"
Himself, that's who, Eddie thought. He's been kidding himself.
As if this thought had summoned them, those terrible chimes began
again. The hoods gathered in Tower's storeroom office didn't hear
them, but Jake and Oy did; Eddie could read it on their distressed
faces. And suddenly this room, already dim, began to grow dimmer still.
We're going back, Eddie thought. Jesus, we're going back! But not
before-
He bent forward between Andolini and Balazar, aware that both men were
looking around with wide, wary eyes, not caring. What he cared about
was the paper. Someone had hired Balazar first to get it signed
(probably) and then to shove it under Tower/Toren's nose when the time
was right (certainly). In most cases, Il Roche would have been content
to send a couple of his hard boys-what he called his "gentlemen"-on
an errand like that. This job, however, was important enough to warrant
his personal attention. Eddie wanted to know why.
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT
This document constitutes a Pact of Agreement between Mr. Calvin Tower,
a New York State resident, owning real property which is principally a
vacant lot, identified as Lot # 298 and Block # 19, located ...
Those chimes wriggled through his head again, making him shiver. This
time they were louder. The shadows drew thicker, leaping up the storage
room's walls. The darkness Eddie had sensed out on the street was
breaking through. They might be swept away, and that would be bad. They
might be drowned in it, and that would be worse, of course it would,
being drowned in darkness would surely be an awful way to go.
And suppose there were things in that darkness? Hungry things like the
doorkeeper?
There are. That was Henry's voice. For the first time in almost two
months. Eddie could imagine Henry standing just behind him and grinning
a sallow junkie's grin: all bloodshot eyes and yellow, uncared-for
teeth. You know there are. But when you hear the chimes, you got to go,
bro, as I think you know.
"Eddie!" Jake cried. "It's coming back! Do you hear it?"
"Grab my belt," Eddie said. His eyes raced back and forth over the
paper in Tower's pudgy hands. Balazar, Andolini, and Big Nose were
still looking around. Biondi had actually drawn his gun.
"Your-?"
"Maybe we won't be separated," Eddie said. The chimes were louder than
ever, and he groaned. The words of the agreement blurred in front of
him. Eddie squinted his eyes, bringing the print back together:
... identified as Lot #298 and Block #19, located in Manhattan, New
York City, on 46th Street and 2nd Avenue, and Sombra Corporation, a
corporation doing business within the State of New York.
On this day of July 15,1976, Sombra is paying a non-returnable sum of
$100,000.00 to Calvin Tower, receipt of which is acknowledged in regard
to this property. In consideration thereof, Calvin Tower agrees not to
...
July 15th, 1976. Not quite a year ago.
Eddie felt the darkness sweeping down on them, and tried to cram the
rest of it through his eyes and into his brain: enough, maybe, to make
sense of what was going on here. If he could do that, it would be at
least a step toward figuring out what all this meant to them.
If the chimes don't drive me crazy. If the things in the darkness don't
eat us on the way back.
"Eddie!" Jake. And terrified, by the sound. Eddie ignored him.
... Calvin Tower agrees not to sell or lease or otherwise encumber the
property during a one-year period commencing on the date hereof and
ending on July 15, 1977. It is understood that the Sombra Corporation
shall have first right of purchase on the above mentioned property, as
defined below.
During this period, Calvin Tower will fully preserve and protect Sombra
Corporation's stated interest in the above-mentioned Property and will
permit no liens or other encumbrances...
There was more, but now the chimes were hideous, head-bursting. For
just one moment Eddie understood-hell, could almost see-how thin
this world had become. All of the worlds, probably. As thin and worn as
his own jeans. He caught one final phrase from the agreement:... if
these conditions are met, will have the right to sell or otherwise
dispose of the property to Sombra or any other party. Then the words
were gone, everything was gone, spinning into a black whirlpool. Jake
held onto Eddie's belt with one hand and Oy with the other. Oy was
barking wildly now, and Eddie had another confused image of Dorothy
being swirled away to the Land of Oz.
There were things in the darkness: looming shapes behind weird
phosphorescent eyes, the sort of things you saw in movies about
exploring the deepest cracks of the ocean floor. Except in those
movies, the explorers were always inside a steel diving-bell, while he
and Jake-
The chimes grew to an ear-splitting volume. Eddie felt as if he had
been jammed headfirst into the works of Big Ben as it was striking
midnight. He screamed without hearing himself. And then it was gone,
everything was all gone--Jake, Oy, Mid-World-and he was floating
somewhere beyond the stars and the galaxies.
Susannah!.'he cried. Where are you, Suze?
No answer. Only darkness.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 06:31:36 -0800
--------
Chapter III: Mia
ONE
Once upon a time, back in the sixties (before the world moved on),
there had been a woman named Odetta Holmes, a pleasant and really quite
socially conscious young woman who was wealthy, good-looking, and
perfectly willing to look out for the other guy. (Or gal.) Without even
realizing it, this woman shared her body with a far less pleasant
creature named Detta Walker. Detta did not give a tin shit for the
other guy (or gal). Rhea of the Coos would have recognized Detta, and
called her sister. On the other side of Mid-World, Roland of Gilead,
the last gunslinger, had drawn this divided woman to him and had
created a third, who was far better, far stronger, than either of the
previous two. This was the woman with whom Eddie Dean had fallen in
love. She called him husband, and thus herself by the name of his
father. Having missed the feminist squabbles of later decades, she did
this quite happily. If she did not call herself Susannah Dean with
pride as well as happiness, it was only because her mother had taught
her that pride goeth before a fall.
Now there was a fourth woman. She had been born out of the third in yet
another time of stress and change. She cared nothing for Odetta, Detta,
or Susannah; she cared for nothing save the new chap who was on his
way. The new chap needed to be fed. The banqueting hall was near. That
was what mattered and all that mattered.
This new woman, every bit as dangerous in her own way as Detta Walker
had been, was Mia. She bore the name of no man's father, only the word
that in the High Speech means mother.
TWO
She walked slowly down long stone corridors toward the place of
feasting. She walked past the rooms of ruin, past the empty naves and
niches, past forgotten galleries where the apartments were hollow and
none was the number. Somewhere in this castle stood an old throne
drenched in ancient blood. Somewhere ladderways led to bone-walled
crypts that went gods knew how deep. Yet there was life here; life and
rich food. Mia knew this as well as she knew the legs under her and the
textured, many-layered skirt swishing against them. Rich food. Life for
you and for your crop, as the saying went. And she was so hungry now.
Of course! Wasn't she eating for two?
She came to a broad staircase. A sound, faint but powerful, rose up to
her: the beat-beat-beat of slo-trans engines buried in the earth below
the deepest of the crypts. Mia cared nothing for them, nor for North
Central Positronics, Ltd., which had built them and set them in motion
tens of thousands of years before. She cared nothing for the dipolar
computers, or the doors, or the Beams, or the Dark Tower which stood at
the center of everything.
What she cared about was the smells. They drifted up to her, thick and
wonderful. Chicken and gravy and roasts of pork dressed in suits of
crackling fat. Sides of beef beaded with blood, wheels of moist cheese,
huge Calla Fundy shrimp like plump orange commas. Split fish with
staring black eyes, their bellies brimming with sauce. Great pots of
jambalaya and fanata, the vast caldo largo stews of the far south. Add
to this a hundred fruits and a thousand sweets, and still you were only
at the beginning! The appetizers! The first mouthfuls of the first
course!
Mia ran quickly down the broad central staircase, the skin of her palm
skimming silkily along the bannister, her small slippered feet
stuttering on the steps. Once she'd had a dream that she had been
pushed in front of an underground train by an awful man, and her legs
had been cut off at the knee. But dreams were foolish. Her feet were
there, and the legs above them, weren't they? Yes! And so was the babe
in her belly. The chap, wanting to be fed. He was hungry, and so was
she.
THREE
>From the foot of the stairs, a wide corridor floored with polished
black marble ran ninety feet to a pair of tall double doors. Mia
hurried that way. She saw her reflection floating below her, and the
electric flambeaux that burned in the depths of the marble like torches
underwater, but she did not see the man who came along behind her,
descending the sweeping curve of the stairs not in dress pumps but in
old and range-battered boots. He wore faded jeans and a shirt of blue
chambray instead of court clothes. One gun, a pistol with a worn
sandalwood grip, hung at his left side, the holster tied down with
rawhide. His face was tanned and lined and weathered. His hair was
black, although now seeded with growing streaks of white. His eyes were
his most striking feature. They were blue and cold and steady. Detta
Walker had feared no man, not even this one, but she had feared those
shooter's eyes.
There was a foyer just before the double doors. It was floored with red
and black marble squares. The wood-paneled walls were hung with faded
portraits of old lords and ladies. In the center was a statue made of
entwined rose marble and chrome steel. It seemed to be a knight errant
with what might have been a sixgun or a short sword raised above his
head. Although the face was mostly smooth-the sculptor had done no
more than hint at the features-Mia knew who it was, right enough. Who
it must be.
"I salute thee, Arthur Eld," she said, and dropped her deepest curtsy.
"Please bless these things I'm about to take to my use. And to the use
of my chap. Good evening to you." She could not wish him long days upon
the earth, for his days-and those of most of his kind-were gone.
Instead she touched her smiling lips with the tips of her fingers and
blew him a kiss. Having made her manners, she walked into the dining
hall.
It was forty yards wide and seventy yards long, that room.
Brilliant electric torches in crystal sheaths lined both sides.
Hundreds of chairs stood in place at a vast ironwood table laden with
delicacies both hot and cold. There was a white plate with delicate
blue webbing, a forspecial plate, in front of each chair. The chairs
were empty, the forspecial banquet plates were empty, and the
wineglasses were empty, although the wine to fill them stood in golden
buckets at intervals along the table, chilled and ready. It was as she
had known it would be, as she had seen it in her fondest, clearest
imaginings, as she had found it again and again, and would find it as
long as she (and the chap) needed it. Wherever she found herself, this
castle was near. And if there was a smell of dampness and ancient mud,
what of that? If there were scuttering sounds from the shadows under
the table-mayhap the sound of rats or even fortnoy weasels-why
should she care? Abovetable, all was lush and lighted, fragrant and
ripe and ready for taking. Let the shadows belowtable take care of
themselves. That was none of her business, no, none of hers.
"Here comes Mia, daughter of none!" she called gaily to the silent room
with its hundred aromas of meats and sauces and creams and fruits. "I
am hungry and I will be fed! Moreover, I'll feed my chap! If anyone
would say against me, let him step forward! Let me see him very well,
and he me!"
No one stepped forward, of course. Those who might once have banqueted
here were long gone. Now there was only the deep and sleepy beat of the
slo-trans engines (and those faint and unpleasant scampering sounds
from the Land of Undertable). Behind her, the gunslinger stood quietly,
watching. Nor was it for the first time. He saw no castle but he saw
her; he saw her very well.
"Silence gives consent!" she called. She pressed her hand to her belly,
which had begun to protrude outward. To curve. Then, with a laugh, she
cried: "Aye, so it does! Here comes Mia to the feast! May it serve both
her and the chap who grows inside her! May it serve them very well!"
And she did feast, but not in one place and never from one of the
plates. She hated the plates, the white-and-blue forspecial.
She didn't know why and didn't care to know. What she cared about was
the food. She walked along the table like a woman at the world's
grandest buffet, taking things with her fingers and tossing them into
her mouth, sometimes chewing meat hot and tender right off the bone
before slinging the joints back onto their serving platters. A few
times she missed these and the chunks of meat would go rolling across
the white linen tablecloth, leaving splotches of juice in nosebleed
stains. One of these rolling roasts overturned a gravy-boat. One
smashed a crystal serving dish filled with cranberry jelly. A third
rolled clean off the far side of the table, where Mia heard something
drag it underneath. There was a brief, squealing squabble, followed by
a howl of pain as something sank its teeth into something else. Then
silence. It was brief, though, and soon broken by Mia's laughter. She
wiped her greasy fingers on her bosom, doing it slowly. Enjoying the
way the stains of the mixed meats and juices spread on the expensive
silk. Enjoying the ripening curves of her breasts and the feel of her
nipples under her fingertips, rough and hard and excited.
She made her way slowly down the table, talking to herself in many
voices, creating a kind of lunatic chitchat. How they hangin, honey ?
Oh they hanging just fine, thank you so much for asking, Mia. Do you
really believe that Oswald was working alone when he shot Kennedy?
Never in a million years, darling-that was a CIA job the whole way.
Them, or those honky millionaires from the Alabama steel crescent.
Bombingham, Alabama, honey, ain't it the truth ? Have you heard the new
Joan Baez record ? My God, yes, doesn't she sing like an angel? I hear
that she and Bob Dylan are going to get themselves married...
And on and on, chitter and chatter. Roland heard Odetta's cultured
voice and Detta's rough but colorful profanity. He heard Susannah's
voice, and many others, as well. How many women in her head? How many
personalities, formed and half-formed? He watched her reach over the
empty plates that weren't there and empty glasses (also not there),
eating directly from the serving platters, chewing everything with the
same hungry relish, her face gradually picking up the shine of grease,
the bodice of her gown (which he did not see but sensed) darkening as
she wiped her fingers there again and again, squeezing the cloth,
matting it against her breasts-these motions were too clear to
mistake. And at each stop, before moving on, she would seize the empty
air in front of her and throw a plate he could not see either on the
floor at her feet or across the table at a wall that must exist in her
dream.
"There!" she'd scream in the defiant voice of Detta Walker. "There, you
nasty old Blue Lady, I done broke it again! I broke yo' fuckin plate,
and how do you like it? How do you like it now?"
Then, stepping to the next place, she might utter a pleasant but
restrained little trill of laughter and ask so-and-so how their boy
so-and-so was coming along down there at Morehouse, and wasn't it
wonderful to have such a fine school for people of color, just the most
wonderful!... thing! And how is your Mamma, dear? Oh I am so sorry to
hear it, we'll all be praying for her recovery.
Reaching across another of those make-believe plates as she spoke.
Grabbing up a great tureen filled with glistening black roe and lemon
rinds. Lowering her face into it like a hog dropping its face into the
trough. Gobbling. Raising her face again, smiling delicately and
demurely in the glow of the electric torches, the fish eggs standing
out like black sweat on her brown skin, dotting her cheeks and her
brow, nestling around her nostrils like clots of old blood-Oh yes, I
think we are making wonderful progress, folks like that Bull Connor are
living in the sunset years now, and the best revenge on them is that
they know it-and then she would throw the tureen backward over her
head like a crazed volleyball player, some of the roe raining down in
her hair (Roland could almost see it), and when the tureen smashed
against the stone, her polite isn't-this-a-wonderful-party face would
cramp into a ghoulish Detta Walker snarl and she might scream, "Dere,
you nasty old Blue Lady, how dat feel? You want to stick some of dat
caviar up yo dry-ass cunt, you go on and do it! You go right on! Dat be
fine, sho!"
And then she would move on to the next place. And the next. And the
next. Feeding herself in the great banquet hall. Feeding herself and
feeding her chap. Never turning to see Roland at all. Never realizing
that this place did not, strictly speaking, even exist.
FOUR
Eddie and Jake had been far from Roland's mind and concerns as the four
of them (five, if Oy was counted) bedded down after feasting on the
fried muffin-balls. He had been focused on Susannah. The gunslinger was
quite sure she would go wandering again tonight, and again he would
follow after her when she did. Not to see what she was up to; he knew
what it would be in advance.
No, his chief purpose had been protection. Early that afternoon, around
the time Jake had returned with his armload of food, Susannah had begun
to show signs Roland knew: speech that was clipped and short, movements
that were a little too jerky to be graceful, an absent tendency to rub
at her temple or above her left eyebrow, as if there was a pain there.
Did Eddie not see those signs? Roland wondered. Eddie had been a dull
observer indeed when Roland first met him, but he had changed greatly
since then, and...
And he loved her. Loved her. How could he and not see what Roland saw?
The signs weren't quite as obvious as they had been on the beach at the
edge of the Western Sea, when Detta was preparing to leap forward and
wrest control from Odetta, but they were there, all right, and not so
different, at that.
On the other hand, Roland's mother had had a saying, Love stumbles. It
could be that Eddie was simply too close to her to see. Or doesn't want
to, Roland thought. Doesn't want to face the idea that we might have to
go through that whole business again. The business of making her face
herself and her divided nature.
Except this time it wasn't about her. Roland had suspected this for a
long time-since before their palaver with the people of River
Crossing, in fact-and now he knew. No, it wasn't about her.
And so he'd lain there, listening to their breathing lengthen as they
dropped off one by one: Oy, then Jake, then Susannah. Eddie last.
Well... not quite last. Faintly, very faintly, Roland could hear a
murmur of conversation from the folk on the other side of yonder south
hill, the ones who were trailing them and watching them. Nerving
themselves to step forward and make themselves known, very likely.
Roland's ears were sharp, but not quite sharp enough to pick out what
they were saying. There were perhaps half a dozen murmured exchanges
before someone uttered a loud shushing hiss. Then there was silence,
except for the low, intermittent snuffling of the wind in the treetops.
Roland lay still, looking up into the darkness where no stars shone,
waiting for Susannah to rise. Eventually she did.
But before that, Jake, Eddie, and Oy went todash.
FIVE
Roland and his mates had learned about todash (what there was to learn)
from Vannay, the tutor of court in the long-ago when they had been
young. They had been a quintet to begin with: Roland, Alain, Cuthbert,
Jamie, and Wallace, Vannay's son. Wallace, fiercely intelligent but
ever sickly, had died of the falling sickness, sometimes called king's
evil. Then they had been four, and under the umbrella of true ka-tet.
Vannay had known it as well, and that knowing was surely part of his
sorrow. Cort taught them to navigate by the sun and stars; Vannay
showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the
mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With
history, logic problems, and tutorials on what he called "the universal
truths," Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do
so. Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and
his sweet but distracted smile, taught them that violence worsened
problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow
chamber, where all true sounds became distorted by echoes.
He taught them physics-what physics there was. He taught them
chemistry-what chemistry was left. He taught them to finish such
sentences as "That tree is like a" and "When I'm running I feel as
happy as a" and "We couldn't help laughing because." Roland hated these
exercises, but Vannay wouldn't let him slip away from them. "Your
imagination is a poor thing, Roland," the tutor told him once-Roland
might have been eleven at the time. "I will not let you feed it short
rations and make it poorer still."
He had taught them the Seven Dials of Magic, refusing to say if he
believed in any of them, and Roland thought it was tangential to one of
these lessons that Vannay had mentioned todash. Or perhaps you
capitalized it, perhaps it was Todash. Roland didn't know for sure. He
knew that Vannay had spoken of the Manni sect, people who were far
travelers. And hadn't he also mentioned the Wizard's Rainbow?
Roland thought yes, but he had twice had the pink bend o' the rainbow
in his own possession, once as a boy and once as a man, and although he
had traveled in it both times-with his friends on the second
occasion-it had never taken him todash.
Ah, but how would you know? he asked himself. How would you know,
Roland, when you were inside it?
Because Cuthbert and Alain would have told him, that was why.
Are you sure?
Some feeling so strange as to be unidentifiable rose in the
gunslinger's bosom-was it indignation? horror? perhaps even a sense
of betrayal?-as he realized that no, he wasn't sure. All he knew was
that the ball had taken him deep into itself, and he had been lucky to
ever get out again.
There's no ball here, he thought, and again it was that other
voice-the dry, implacable voice of his old limping tutor, whose grief
for his only son had never really ended-that answered him, and the
words were the same:
Are you sure? Gunslinger, are you sure?
SIX
It started with a low crackling sound. Roland's first thought was the
campfire: one of them had gotten some green fir boughs in there, the
coals had finally reached them, and they were producing that sound as
the needles smoldered. But-
The sound grew louder, became a kind of electric buzzing. Roland sat up
and looked across the dying fire. His eyes widened and his heart began
to speed up.
Susannah had turned from Eddie, had drawn away a little, too. Eddie had
reached out and so had Jake. Their hands touched. And, as Roland looked
at them, they commenced fading in and out of existence in a series of
jerky pulses. Oy was doing the same thing. When they were gone, they
were replaced by a dull gray glow that approximated the shapes and
positions of their bodies, as if something was holding their places in
reality. Each time they came back, there would be flat crackling buzz.
Roland could see thieir closed eyelids ripple as the balls rolled
beneath.
Dreaming. But not just dreaming. This was todash, the passing between
two worlds. Supposedly the Manni could do it. And supposedly some
pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow could make you do it, whether you wanted
to or not. One piece of it in particular.
They could get caught between and fall, Roland diought. Vannay said
that, too. He said that going todash was full of peril.
What else had he said? Roland had no time to recall, for at that moment
Susannah sat up, slipped the soft leather caps Roland had made her over
the stumps of her legs, then hoisted herself into her wheelchair. A
moment later she was rolling toward the ancient trees on the nordi side
of the road. It was directly away from the place where the watchers
were camped; there was that much to be grateful for.
Roland stayed where he was for a moment, torn. But in the end, his
course was clear enough. He couldn't wake them up while they were in
the todash state; to do so would be a horrible risk. All he could do
was follow Susannah, as he had on other nights, and hope she didn't get
herself into trouble.
You might also do some thinking about what happens next. That was
Vannay's dry, lecturely voice. Now that his old tutor was back, he
apparently meant to stay for awhile. Reason was never your strong
point, but you must do it, nevertheless. You'll want to wait until your
visitors make themselves known, of course-until you can be sure of
what they want-but eventually, Roland, you must act. Think first,
however. Sooner would be better than later. Yes, sooner was always
better than later. There was another loud, buzzing crackle. Eddie and
Jake were back, Jake lying with his arm curled around Oy, and then they
were gone again, nothing left where they had been but a faint
ectoplasmic shimmer. Well, never mind. His job was to follow Susannah.
As for Eddie and Jake, there would be water if God willed it.
Suppose you come back here and they're gone ? It happens, Vannay said
so. What will you tell her if she wakes and finds them both gone, her
husband and her adopted son ?
It was nothing he could worry about now. Right now there was Susannah
to worry about, Susannah to keep safe.
SEVEN
On the north side of the road, old trees with enormous trunks stood at
considerable distances from each other. Their branches might entwine
and create a solid canopy overhead, but at ground level there was
plenty of room for Susannah's wheelchair, and she moved along at a good
pace, weaving between the vast ironwoods and pines, rolling downhill
over a fragrant duff of mulch and needles.
Not Susannah. Not Delta or Odetta, either. This one calls herself Mia.
Roland didn't care if she called herself Queen o' Green Days, as long
as she came back safe, and the other two were still there when she did.
He began to smell a brighter, fresher green: reeds and water-weeds.
With it came the smell of mud, the thump of frogs, the sarcastic hool!
hool salute of an owl, the splash of water as something jumped. This
was followed by a thin shriek as something died, maybe the jumper,
maybe the jumped-upon. Underbrush began to spring up in the duff, first
dotting it and then crowding it out. The tree-cover thinned. Mosquitoes
and chiggers whined. Binnie-bugs stitched the air. The bog-smells grew
stronger.
The wheels of the chair had passed over the duff without leaving any
trace. As duff gave way to straggling low growth, Roland began to see
broken twigs and torn-off leaves marking her passage. Then, as she
reached the more or less level low ground, the wheels began to sink
into the increasingly soft earth. Twenty paces farther on, he began to
see liquid seeping into the tracks. She was too wise to get stuck,
though-too crafty. Twenty paces beyond the first signs of seepage, he
came to the wheelchair itself, abandoned. Lying on the seat were her
pants and shirt. She had gone on into the bog naked save for the
leather caps that covered her stumps.
Down here there were ribbons of mist hanging over puddles of standing
water. Grassy hummocks rose; on one, wired to a dead log that had been
planted upright, was what Roland at first took for an ancient
stuffy-guy. When he got closer, he saw it was a human skeleton. The
skull's forehead had been smashed inward, leaving a triangle of
darkness between the staring sockets. Some sort of primitive war-club
had made that wound, no doubt, and the corpse (or its lingering spirit)
had been left to mark this as the edge of some tribe's territory. They
were probably long dead or moved on, but caution was ever a virtue.
Roland drew his gun and continued after the woman, stepping from
hummock to hummock, wincing at the occasional jab of pain in his right
hip. It took all his concentration and agility to keep up with her.
Partly this was because she hadn't Roland's interest in staying as dry
as possible. She was as naked as a mermaid and moved like one, as
comfortable in the muck and swamp-ooze as on dry land. She crawled over
the larger hummocks, slid through the water between them, pausing every
now and then to pick off a leech. In the darkness, the walking and
sliding seemed to merge into a single slithering motion that was eely
and disturbing.
She went on perhaps a quarter of a mile into the increasingly oozy bog
with the gunslinger following patiently along behind her. He kept as
quiet as possible, although he doubted if there was any need; the part
of her that saw and felt and thought was far from here.
At last she came to a halt, standing on her truncated legs and holding
to tough tangles of brush on either side in order to keep her balance.
She looked out over the black surface of a pond, head up, body still.
The gunslinger couldn't tell if the pond was big or small; its borders
were lost in the mist. Yet there was light here, some sort of faint and
unfocused radiance which seemed to lie just beneath the surface of the
water itself, perhaps emanating from submerged and slowly rotting logs.
She stood there, surveying this muck-crusted woodland pond like a queen
surveying a... a what? What did she see? A banquet hall? That was what
he had come to believe. Almost to see. It was a whisper from her mind
to his, and it dovetailed with what she said and did. The banqueting
hall was her mind's ingenious way of keeping Susannah apart from Mia as
it had kept Odetta apart from Detta all those years. Mia might have any
number of reasons for wanting to keep her existence a secret, but
surely the greatest of these had to do with the life she carried inside
her.
The chap, she called it.
Then, with a suddenness that still startled him (although he had seen
this before, as well), she began to hunt, slipping in eerie splashless
silence first along the edge of the pond and then a little way out into
it. Roland watched her with an expression that contained both horror
and lust as she knitted and wove her way in and out of the reeds,
between and over the tussocks. Now, instead of picking the leeches off
her skin and throwing them away, she tossed them into her mouth like
pieces of candy. The muscles in her thighs rippled. Her brown skin
gleamed like wet silk. When she turned (Roland had by this time stepped
behind a tree and become one of the shadows), he could clearly see the
way her breasts had ripened.
The problem, of course, extended beyond "the chap." There was Eddie to
consider, as well. What the hell's wrong with you, Roland? Roland could
hear him saying. That might be our kid. I mean, you can't know for sure
that it isn't. Yeah, yeah, I know something had her while we were
yanking Jake through, but that doesn't necessarily mean...
On and on and on, blah-blah-blah as Eddie himself might say, and why?
Because he loved her and would want the child of their union. And
because arguing came as naturally to Eddie Dean as breathing. Cuthbert
had been the same.
In the reeds, the naked woman's hand pistoned forward and seized a
good-sized frog. She squeezed and the frog popped, squirting guts and a
shiny load of eggs between her fingers. Its head burst. She lifted it
to her mouth and ate it greedily down while its greenish-white rear
legs still twitched, licking the blood and shiny ropes of tissue from
her knuckles. Then she mimed throwing something down and cried out "How
you like that, you stinkin Blue Lady?" in a low, guttural voice that
made Roland shiver. It was Detta Walker's voice. Detta at her meanest
and craziest.
With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small
fish... then another frog... and then a real prize: a water-rat that
squeaked and writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it
and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent
her head down and regurgitated the waste-a twisted mass of fur and
splintered bones.
Show him this, then-always assuming that he and Jake get back from
whatever adventure they're on, that is. And say, "I know that women are
supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but
doesn't this seem a little too strange?Look at her, questing through
the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and
tell me she's doing that in order to feed your child. Any human child."
Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he didn't know was what
Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing
something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if
this business wasn't worrisome enough, now there was todash. And
strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the
least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost
comforting. He didn't know what they wanted, and yet he did know. He
had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same
thing.
EIGHT
Now the woman who called herself Mia began to talk as she hunted.
Roland was familiar with this part of her ritual as well, but it
chilled him nevertheless. He was looking right at her and it was still
hard to believe all those different voices could be coming from the
same throat. She asked herself how she was. She told herself she was
doing fine, thank you so vereh much. She spoke of someone named Bill,
or perhaps it was Bull. She asked after someone's mother. She asked
someone about a place called Morehouse, and then in a deep, gravelly
voice-a man's voice, beyond doubt-she told herself that she didn't
go to Morehouse or no house. She laughed raucously at this, so it must
have been some sort of joke. She introduced herself several times (as
she had on other nights) as Mia, a name Roland knew well from his early
life in Gilead. It was almost a holy name. Twice she curtsied, lifting
invisible skirts in a way that tugged at the gunslinger's heart-he
had first seen that sort of curtsy in Mejis, when he and his friends
Alain and Cuthbert had been sent there by their fathers.
She worked her way back to the edge of the
(hall)
pond, glistening and wet. She stayed there without moving for five
minutes, then ten. The owl uttered its derisive salute
again-hool!-and as if in response, the moon came out of the clouds
for a brief look around. When it did, some small animal's bit of shady
concealment disappeared. It tried to dart past the woman. She snared it
faultlessly and plunged her face into its writhing belly. There was a
wet crunching noise, followed by several smacking bites. She held the
remains up in the moonlight, her dark hands and wrists darker with its
blood. Then she tore it in half and bolted down the remains. She gave a
resounding belch and rolled herself back into the water. This time she
made a great splash, and Roland knew tonight's banqueting was done. She
had even eaten some of the binnie-bugs, snatching them effortlessly out
of the air. He could only hope nothing she'd taken in would sicken her.
So far, nothing had.
While she made her rough toilet, washing off the mud and blood, Roland
retreated back the way he'd come, ignoring the more frequent pains in
his hip and moving with all his guile. He had watched her go through
this three times before, and once had been enough to see how gruesomely
sharp her senses were while in this state.
He paused at her wheelchair, looking around to make sure he'd left no
trace of himself. He saw a bootprint, smoothed it away, then tossed a
few leaves over it for good measure. Not too many; too many might be
worse than none at all. With that done, he headed back toward the road
and their camp, not hurrying anymore. She would pause for a little
housekeeping of her own before going on. What would Mia see as she was
cleaning Susannah's wheelchair, he wondered? Some sort of small,
motorized cart? It didn't matter. What did was how clever she was. If
he hadn't awakened with a need to make water just as she left on one of
her earlier expeditions, he quite likely still wouldn't know about her
hunting trips, and he was supposed to be clever about such things.
Not as clever as she, maggot. Now, as if the ghost of Vannay were not
enough, here was Cort to lecture him. She's shown you before, hasn't
she?
Yes. She had shown him cleverness as three women. Now there was this
fourth.
NINE
When Roland saw the break in the trees ahead-the road they'd been
following, and the place where they'd camped for the night-he took
two long, deep breaths. These were meant to steady him and didn't
succeed very well.
Water if God wills it, he reminded himself. About the great matters,
Roland, you have no say.
Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his,
but one he'd learned to live with.
He took another breath, then stepped out. He released the air in a
long, relieved sigh as he saw Eddie and Jake lying deeply asleep beside
the dead fire. Jake's right hand, which had been linked with Eddie's
left when the gunslinger had followed Susannah out of camp, now circled
Oy's body.
The bumbler opened one eye and regarded Roland. Then he closed it
again.
Roland couldn't hear her coming, but sensed her just the same. He lay
down quickly, rolled over onto his side, and put his face in the crook
of his elbow. And from this position he watched as the wheelchair
rolled out of the trees. She had cleaned it quickly but well. Roland
couldn't see a single spot of mud. The spokes gleamed in the moonlight.
She parked the chair where it had been before, slipped out of it with
her usual grace, and moved across to where Eddie lay. Roland watched
her approach her husband's sleeping form with some anxiety. Anyone, he
thought, who had met Detta Walker would have felt that anxiety. Because
the woman who called herself mother was simply too close to what Detta
had been.
Lying completely still, like one in sleep's deepest sling, Roland
prepared himself to move.
Then she brushed the hair back from the side of Eddie's face and kissed
the hollow of his temple. The tenderness in that gesture told the
gunslinger all he needed to know. It was safe to sleep. He closed his
eyes and let the darkness take him.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 24 Feb 2005 05:58:12 -0800
--------
Chapter IV: Palaver
ONE
When Roland woke in the morning, Susannah was still asleep but Eddie
and Jake were up. Eddie had built a small new fire on the gray bones of
the old one. He and the boy sat close to it for the warmth, eating what
Eddie called gunslinger burritos. They looked both excited and worried.
"Roland," Eddie said, "I think we need to talk. Something happened to
us last night-"
"I know," Roland said. "I saw. You went todash."
"Todash?" Jake asked. "What's that?"
Roland started to tell them, then shook his head. "If we're going to
palaver, Eddie, you'd better wake Susannah up. That way we won't have
to double back over the first part." He glanced south. "And hopefully
our new friends won't interrupt us until we've had our talk. They're
none of this." But already he was wondering about that.
He watched with more than ordinary interest as Eddie shook Susannah
awake, quite sure but by no means positive that it would be Susannah
who opened her eyes. It was. She sat up, stretched, ran her fingers
through her tight curls. "What's your problem, honeychile? I was good
for another hour, at least."
"We need to talk, Suze," Eddie said.
"All you want, but not quite yet," she said. "God, but I'm stiff."
"Sleeping on hard ground'll do it every time," Eddie said.
Not to mention hunting naked in the bogs and damps, Roland thought.
"Pour me some water, sug." She held out her palms, and Eddie filled
them with water from one of the skins. She dashed this over her cheeks
and into her eyes, gave out a little shivery cry, and said, "Cold."
"Old!" Oy said.
"Not yet," she told the bumbler, "but you give me a few more months
like the last few, and I will be. Roland, you Mid-World folks know
about coffee, right?"
Roland nodded. "From the plantations of the Outer Arc. Down south."
"If we come across some, we'll hook it, won't we? You promise me, now."
"I promise," Roland said.
Susannah, meanwhile, was studying Eddie. "What's going on? You boys
don't look so good."
"More dreams," Eddie said.
"Me too," Jake said.
"Not dreams," the gunslinger said. "Susannah, how did you sleep?"
She looked at him candidly. Roland did not sense even the shadow of a
lie in her answer. "Like a rock, as I usually do. One thing all this
traveling is good for-you can throw your damn Nembutal away."
"What's this toadish thing, Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Todash," he said, and explained it to them as well as he could. What
he remembered best from Vannay's teachings was how the Manni spent long
periods fasting in order to induce the right state of mind, and how
they traveled around, looking for exactly the right spot in which to
induce the todash state. This was something they determined with
magnets and large plumb-bobs.
"Sounds to me like these guys would have been right at home down in
Needle Park," Eddie said.
"Anywhere in Greenwich Village," Susannah added.
" 'Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it?' "Jake said in a grave, deep voice, and
they all laughed. Even Roland laughed a little.
"Todash is another way of traveling," Eddie said when the laughter had
stopped. "Like the doors. And the glass balls. Is that right?"
Roland started to say yes, then hesitated. "I think they might all be
variations of the same thing," he said. "And according to Vannay, the
glass balls-the pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow- make going todash
easier. Sometimes too easy."
Jake said, "We really flickered on and off like... like light-bulbs?
What you call sparklights?"
"Yes-you appeared and disappeared. When you were gone, there was a
dim glow where you'd been, almost as if something were holding your
place for you."
"Thank God if it was," Eddie said. "When it ended... when those chimes
started playing again and we kicked loose... I'll tell you the truth, I
didn't think we were going to get back."
"Neither did I," Jake said quietly. The sky had clouded over again, and
in the dull morning light, the boy looked very pale. "I lost you."
"I was never so glad to see anyplace in my life as I was when I opened
my eyes and saw this little piece of road," Eddie said. "And you beside
me, Jake. Even Rover looked good to me." He glanced at Oy, then over at
Susannah. "Nothing like this happened to you last night, hon?"
"We'd have seen her," Jake said.
"Not if she todashed off to someplace else," Eddie said.
Susannah shook her head, looking troubled. "I just slept the night
away. As I told you. What about you, Roland?"
"Nothing to report," Roland said. As always, he would keep his own
counsel until his instinct told him it was time to share. And besides,
what he'd said wasn't exactly a lie. He looked keenly at Eddie and
Jake. "There's trouble, isn't there?"
Eddie and Jake looked at each other, then back at Roland. Eddie
sighed."Yeah, probably."
"How bad? Do you know?"
"I don't think we do. Do we, Jake?"
Jake shook his head.
"But I've got some ideas," Eddie went on, "and if I'm right, we've got
a problem. A big one." He swallowed. Hard. Jake touched his hand, and
the gunslinger was concerned to see how quickly and firmly Eddie took
hold of the boy's fingers.
Roland reached out and drew Susannah's hand into his own. He had a
brief vision of that hand seizing a frog and squeezing the guts out of
it He put it out of his mind. The woman who had done that was not here
now.
"Tell us," he said to Eddie and Jake. "Tell us everything. We would
hear it all."
"Every word," Susannah agreed. "For your fathers' sakes."
TWO
They recounted what had happened to them in the New York of 1977.
Roland and Susannah listened, fascinated, as they told of following
Jake to the bookstore, and of seeing Balazar and his gentlemen pull up
in front.
"Huh!" Susannah said. "The very same bad boys! It's almost like a
Dickens novel."
"Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?" Roland asked.
"A novel's a long story set down in a book," she said. "Dickens wrote
about a dozen. He was maybe the best who ever lived. In his stories,
folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from
other places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way
that always happened. He said Dickens's stories were full of easy
coincidences."
"A teacher who either didn't know about ka or didn't believe in it,"
Roland said.
Eddie was nodding. "Yeah, this is ka, all right. No doubt."
"I'm more interested in the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo than
this storyteller Dickens," Roland said. "Jake, I wonder if you'd-"
"I'm way ahead of you," Jake said, unbuckling the straps of his pack.
Almost reverently, he slid out the battered book telling the adventures
of Charlie the locomotive and his friend, Engineer Bob. They all looked
at the cover. The name below the picture was still Beryl Evans.
"Man," Eddie said. "That is so weird. I mean, I don't want to get
sidetracked, or anything..." He paused, realizing he had just made a
railroading pun, then went on. Roland wasn't very interested in puns
and jokes, anyway. "... but that is weird. The one Jake bought-Jake
Seventy-seven-was by Claudia something Bachman."
"Inez," Jake said. "Also, there was a y. A lowercase y. Any of you know
what that means?"
None of them did, but Roland said there had been names like it in
Mejis. "I believe it was some sort of added honorific. And I'm not sure
it is to the side. Jake, you said the sign in the window was different
from before. How?"
"I can't remember. But you know what? I think if you hypnotized me
again-you know, with the bullet-I could."
"And in time I may," Roland said, "but this morning time is short."
Back to that again, Eddie thought. Yesterday it hardly existed, and now
it's short. But it's all about time, somehow, isn't it"?Rolands old
days, our old days, and these new days. These dangerous new days.
"Why?" Susannah asked.
"Our friends," Roland said, and nodded to the south. "I have a feeling
they'll be making themselves known to us soon."
"Are they our friends?" Jake asked.
"That really is to the side," Roland said, and again wondered if that
were really true. "For now, let's turn the mind of our khef to this
Bookstore of the Mind, or whatever it's called. You saw the harriers
from the Leaning Tower greensticking the owner, didn't you? This man
Tower, or Toren."
"Pressuring him, you mean?" Eddie asked. "Twisting his arm?"
"Yes."
"Sure they were," Jake said.
"Were," Oy put in. "Sure were."
"Bet you anything that Tower and Toren are really the same name,"
Susannah said. "That toren's Dutch for 'tower.' " She saw Roland
getting ready to speak, and held up her hand. "It's the way folks often
do things in our bit of the universe, Roland- change the foreign name
to one that's more... well... American."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "So Stempowicz becomes Stamper... Yakov becomes
Jacob... or..."
"Or Beryl Evans becomes Claudia y Inez Bachman," Jake said. He laughed
but didn't sound very amused.
Eddie picked a half-burned stick out of the fire and began to doodle
with it in the dirt. One by one the Great Letters formed: C... L...
A... U. "Big Nose even said Tower was Dutch. 'A squarehead's always a
squarehead, right, boss?' " He looked at Jake for confirmation. Jake
nodded, then took the stick and continued on with it: D... I... A.
"Him being Dutch makes a lot of sense, you know," Susannah said. "At
one time, the Dutch owned most of Manhattan."
"You want another Dickens touch?" Jake asked. He wrote y in the dirt
after CLAUDIA, then looked up at Susannah. "How about the haunted house
where I came through into this world?"
"The Mansion," Eddie said.
"The Mansion in Dutch Hill," Jake said.
"Dutch Hill. Yeah, that's right. Goddam."
"Let's go to the core," Roland said. "I think it's the agreement paper
you saw. And you felt you had to see it, didn't you?"
Eddie nodded.
"Did your need feel like a part of following the Beam?"
"Roland, I think it was the Beam."
"The way to the Tower, in other words."
"Yeah," Eddie said. He was thinking about the way clouds flowed along
the Beam, the way shadows bent along the Beam, the way every twig of
every tree seemed to turn in its direction. All things serve the Beam,
Roland had told them, and Eddie's need to see the paper Balazar had put
in front of Calvin Tower had felt like a need, harsh and imperative.
"Tell me what it said."
Eddie bit his lip. He didn't feel as scared about this as he had about
carving the key which had ultimately allowed them to rescue Jake and
pull him through to this side, but it was close. Because, like the key,
this was important. If he forgot something, worlds might crash.
"Man, I can't remember it all, not word for word-"
Roland made an impatient gesture. "If I need that, I'll hypnotize you
and get it word for word."
"Do you think it matters?" Susannah asked.
"I think it all matters," Roland said.
"What if hypnosis doesn't work on me?" Eddie asked. "What if I'm not,
like, a good subject?"
"Leave that to me," Roland said.
"Nineteen," Jake said abruptly. They all turned toward him. He was
looking at the letters he and Eddie had drawn in the dirt beside the
dead campfire. "Claudia y Inez Bachman. Nineteen letters."
THREE
Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number
nineteen was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in
time. For now there were other matters.
"The paper," he said. "Let's stay with that for now. Tell me everything
about it you can remember."
"Well, it was a legal agreement, with the seal at the bottom and
everything." Eddie paused, struck by a fairly basic question. Roland
probably got this part of it-he'd been a kind of law enforcement
officer, after all-but it wouldn't hurt to be sure. "You know about
lawyers, don't you?"
Roland spoke in his driest tone. "You forget that I came from Gilead,
Eddie. The most inner of the Inner Baronies. We had more merchants and
farmers and manufactors than lawyers, I think, but the count would have
been close."
Susannah laughed. "You make me think of a scene from Shakespeare,
Roland. Two characters-might have been Falstaff and Prince Hal, I'm
not sure-are talkin about what they're gonna do when they win the war
and take over. And one of em says, 'First we'll kill all the lawyers.'
"
"It would be a fairish way to start," Roland said, and Eddie found his
thoughtful tone rather chilling. Then the gunslinger turned to him
again. "Go on. If you can add anything, Jake, please do. And relax,
both of you, for your fathers' sakes. For now I only want a sketch."
Eddie supposed he'd known that, but hearing Roland say it made him feel
better. "All right. It was a Memorandum of Agreement. That was right at
the top, in big letters. At the bottom it said Agreed to, and there
were two signatures. One was Calvin Tower. The other was Richard
someone. Do you remember, Jake?"
"Sayre," Jake said. "Richard Patrick Sayre." He paused briefly, lips
moving, then nodded. "Nineteen letters."
"And what did it say, this agreement?" Roland asked.
"Not all that much, if you want to know the truth," Eddie said. "Or
that's what it seemed like to me, anyway. Basically it said that Tower
owned a vacant lot on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Second
Avenue-"
"The vacant lot," Jake said. "The one with the rose in it."
"Yeah, that one. Anyway, Tower signed this agreement on July 15th,
1976. Sombra Corporation gave him a hundred grand. What he gave them,
so far as I could tell, was a promise not to sell the lot to anyone but
Sombra for the next year, to take care of it-pay the taxes and
such-and then to give Sombra first right of purchase, assuming he
hasn't sold it to them by then, anyway. Which he hadn't when we were
there, but the agreement still had a month and a half to run."
"Mr. Tower said the hundred thousand was all spent," Jake put in.
"Was there anything in the agreement about this Sombra Corporation
having a topping privilege?" Susannah asked.
Eddie and Jake thought it over, exchanged a glance, then shook their
heads.
"Sure?" Susannah asked.
"Not quite, but pretty sure," Eddie said. "You think it matters?"
"I don't know," Susannah said. "The kind of agreement you're talking
about... well, without a topping privilege, it just doesn't seem to
make sense. What does it boil down to, when you stop to think about it?
'I, Calvin Tower, agree to think about selling you my vacant lot. You
pay me a hundred thousand dollars and I'll think about it for a whole
year. When I'm not drinking coffee and playing chess with my friends,
that is. And when the year's up, maybe I'll sell it to you and maybe
I'll keep it and maybe I'll just auction it off to the highest bidder.
And if you don't like it, sweetcheeks, you just go spit.' "
"You're forgetting something," Roland said mildly.
"What?" Susannah asked.
"This Sombra is no ordinary law-abiding combination. Ask yourself if an
ordinary law-abiding combination would hire someone like Balazar to
carry their messages."
"You have a point," Eddie said. "Tower was mucho scared."
"Anyway," Jake said, "it makes at least a few things clearer. The sign
I saw in the vacant lot, for instance. This Sombra Company also got the
right to 'advertise forthcoming projects' there for their hundred
thousand. Did you see that part, Eddie?"
"I think so. Right after the part about Tower not permitting any liens
or encumbrances on his property, because of Sombra's 'stated interest,'
wasn't it? "
"Right," Jake said. "The sign I saw in the lot said..." He paused,
thinking, then raised his hands and looked between them, as if reading
a sign only he could see: "Mills construction AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE
ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN. And then,
COMING SOON, TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS."
"So that's what they want it for," Eddie said. "Condos. But-"
"What are condominiums?" Susannah asked, frowning. "It sounds like some
newfangled kind of spice rack."
"It's a kind of co-op apartment deal," Eddie said. "They probably had
em in your when, but by a different name."
"Yeah," Susannah said with some asperity. "We called em coops. Or
sometimes we went way downtown and called em apartment buildings."
"It doesn't matter because it was never about condos," Jake said.
"Never about the building the sign said they were going to put there,
for that matter. All that's only, you know... shoot, what's the word?"
"Camouflage?" Roland suggested.
Jake grinned. "Camuflage, yeah. It's about the rose, not the building!
And they can't get at it until they own the ground it grows on. I'm
sure of it."
"You may be right about the building's not meaning anything," Susannah
said, "but that Turtle Bay name has a certain resonance, wouldn't you
say?" She looked at the gunslinger. "That part of Manhattan is called
Turtle Bay, Roland."
He nodded, unsurprised. The Turtle was one of the twelve Guardians, and
almost certainly stood at the far end of the Beam upon which they now
traveled.
"The people from Mills Construction might not know about the rose,"
Jake said, "but I bet the ones from Sombra Corporation do." His hand
stole into Oy's fur, which was thick enough at the billy-bumbler's neck
to make his fingers disappear entirely. "I think that somewhere in New
York City-in some business building, probably in Turtle Bay on the
East Side- there's a door marked sombra corporation. And someplace
behind that door there's another door. The kind that takes you here."
For a minute they sat thinking about it-about worlds spinning on a
single axle in dying harmony-and no one said anything.
FOUR
"Here's what I think is happening," Eddie said. "Suze, Jake, feel free
to step in if you think I'm getting it wrong. This guy Cal Tower's some
sort of custodian for the rose. He may not know it on a conscious
level, but he must be. Him and maybe his whole family before him. It
explains the name."
"Only he's the last," Jake said.
"You can't be sure of that, hon," Susannah said.
"No wedding ring," Jake responded, and Susannah nodded, giving him that
one, at least provisionally.
"Maybe at one time there were lots of Torens owning lots of New York
property," Eddie said, "but those days are gone. Now the only thing
standing between the Sombra Corporation and the rose is one nearly
broke fat guy who changed his name. He's a... what do you call someone
who loves books?"
"A bibliophile," Susannah said.
"Yeah, one of those. And George Biondi may not be Einstein, but he said
at least one smart thing while we were eavesdropping. He said Tower's
place wasn't a real shop but just a hole you poured money into. What's
going on with him is a pretty old story where we come from, Roland.
When my Ma used to see some rich guy on TV-Donald Trump, for
instance-"
"Who?" Susannah asked.
"You don't know him, he would've been just a kid back in '64. And it
doesn't matter. 'Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,' my
mother would tell us. 'It's the American way, boys.'
"So here's Tower, and he's sort of like Roland-the last of his line.
He sells off a piece of property here and a piece there, making his
taxes, making his house payments, keeping up with the credit cards and
the doctor bills, paying for his stock. And yeah, I'm making this up...
except somehow it doesn't feel that way."
"No," Jake said. He spoke in a low, fascinated voice. "It doesn't."
"Perhaps you shared his khef," Roland said. "More likely, you touched
him. As my old friend Alain used to. Go on, Eddie."
"And every year he tells himself the bookstore'll turn around. Catch
on, maybe, the way things in New York sometimes do. Get out of the red
and into the black and then he'll be okay. And finally there's only one
thing left to sell: lot two-ninety-eight on Block Nineteen in Turtle
Bay."
"Two-nine-eight adds up to nineteen," Susannah said. "I wish I could
decide if that means something or if it's just Blue Car Syndrome."
"What's Blue Car Syndrome?" Jake asked.
"When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere."
"Not here, you don't," Jake said.
"Not here," Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes
whole weeks would go by, and Oy would do nothing but give out the
occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might
almost have been the product of original thought. But you didn't know.
Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure.
The way we don't know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and
gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable
wink.
"He holds onto that lot until the bitter end," Eddie said. "I mean hey,
he doesn't even own the crappy building his bookstore's in, he only
leases it."
Jake took over. "Tom and Jerry's Artistic Deli goes out of business,
and Tower has it torn down. Because part of him wants to sell the lot.
That part of him says he'd be crazy not to." Jake fell silent for a
moment, thinking about how some thoughts came in the middle of the
night. Crazy thoughts, crazy ideas, and voices that wouldn't shut up.
"But there's another part of him, another voice-"
"The voice of the Turtle," Susannah put in quietly.
"Yes, the Turtle or the Beam," Jake agreed. "They're probably the same
thing. And this voice tells him he has to hold onto it at all costs."
He looked at Eddie. "Do you think he knows about the rose? Do you think
he goes down there sometimes and looks at it?"
"Does a rabbit shit in the woods?" Eddie responded. "Sure he goes. And
sure he knows. On some level he must know. Because a corner lot in
Manhattan... how much would a thing like that be worth, Susannah?"
"In my time, probably a million bucks," she said. "By 1977, God knows.
Three? Five?" She shrugged. "Enough to let sai Tower go on selling
books at a loss for the rest of his life, provided he was reasonably
careful about how he invested the principal."
Eddie said, "Everything about this shows how reluctant he is to sell. I
mean Suze already pointed out how little Sombra got for their hundred
grand."
"But they did get something," Roland said. "Something very important."
"A foot in the door," Eddie said.
"You say true. And now, as the term of their agreement winds down, they
send your world's version of the Big Coffin Hunters. Hard-caliber boys.
If greed or necessity doesn't compel Tower to sell them the land with
the rose on it, they'll terrify him into it."
"Yeah," Jake said. And who would stand on Tower's side? Maybe Aaron
Deepneau. Maybe no one. "So what do we do?"
"Buy it ourselves," Susannah said promptly. "Of course."
FIVE
There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Eddie nodded
thoughtfully. "Sure, why not? The Sombra Corporation doesn't have a
topping privilege in their little agreement-they probably tried, but
Tower wouldn't go for it. So sure, we'll buy it. How many deerskins do
you think he'll want? Forty? Fifty? If he's a real hard bargainer,
maybe we can throw in some relics from the Old People. You know, cups
and plates and arrowheads. They'd be conversation pieces at cocktail
parties."
Susannah was looking at him reproachfully.
"Okay, maybe not so funny," Eddie said. "But we have to face the facts,
hon. We're nothing but a bunch of dirty-ass pilgrims currently camped
out in some other reality-I mean, this isn't even Mid-World anymore."
"Also," Jake said apologetically, "we weren't even really there, at
least not the way you are when you go through one of the doors. They
sensed us, but basically we were invisible."
"Let's take one thing at a time," Susannah said. "As far as money goes,
I have plenty. If we could get at it, that is."
"How much?" Jake asked. "I know that's sort of impolite- my mother'd
faint if she heard me ask someone that, but-"
"We've come a little bit too far to worry about being polite," Susannah
said. "Truth is, honey, I don't exacdy know. My dad invented a couple
of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made
the most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and
handled the financial side mostly by himself until 1959."
"The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train," Eddie said.
She nodded. "That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father
had a heart attack-the first of many. Some of it was probably stress
over what happened to me, but I won't own all of it. He was a hard
driver, pure and simple."
"You don't have to own any of it," Eddie said. "I mean, it's not as if
you jumped in front of that subway car, Suze."
"I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn't always have
a lot to do with objective truth. With Mama gone, it was my job to take
care of him and I couldn't handle it-I could never completely get the
idea that it was my fault out of my head."
"Gone days," Roland said, and without much sympathy.
"Thanks, sug," Susannah said dryly. "You have such a way of puttin
things in perspective. In any case, my Dad turned over the financial
side of the company to his accountant after that first heart
attack-an old friend named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop
Mose took care of things for me. I'd guess that when Roland yanked me
out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have
been worth eight or ten million dollars. Would that be enough to buy
Mr. Tower's lot, always assuming he'd sell it to us?"
"He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie's right about the
Beam," Roland said. "I believe a deep part of Mr. Tower's mind and
spirit-the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the
first place-has been waiting for us."
"Waiting for the cavalry," Eddie said with a trace of a grin. "Like
Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John Wayne movie."
Roland looked at him, unsmiling. "He's been waiting for the White."
Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them.
"Then I guess he isn't waiting for me," she said.
"Yes," Roland said, "he is." And wondered, briefly, what color that
other one was. Mia.
"We need a door," Jake said.
"We need at least two," Eddie said. "One to deal with Tower, sure. But
before we can do that, we need one to go back to Susannah's when. And I
mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It'd be a
bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and
discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the
whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San
Berdoo."
"Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone," Jake said.
'Tunneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del
Sol."
Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that
would have been funny under other circumstances. "Pop Mose'd never do
such a thing! Why, he's my godfather!"
Jake looked embarrassed. "Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels-Agatha
Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain-and stuff like that happens in them
all the time."
"Besides," Eddie said, "big money can do weird things to people."
She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost
alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn't,
thought it a frog-squeezing look. "How would you know?" she asked. And
then, almost at once, "Oh, sugar, I'm sorry. That was uncalled-for."
"It's okay," Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure
of itself. "Heat of the moment." He reached out, took her hand,
squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie's face grew a
little, started to look as if it belonged there.
"It's just that I know Moses Carver. He's as honest as the day is
long."
Eddie raised his hand-not signaling belief so much as an
unwillingness to go any further down that path.
"Let me see if I understand your idea," Roland said. "First, it depends
upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one
point of when, but two."
There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded.
"Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah's been gone a couple of months,
but nobody's given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in,
everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough,
which might take a little time-"
"The hard part's apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it," Susannah
said. "When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip.
And I'm pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years
old."
"But legally it's yours, right?" Eddie asked. Roland could see that he
was still proceeding with some caution. Hadn't quite got over that
crack-How would you know?-just yet. And the look that had gone with
it. "I mean, he can't stop you from taking it, can he?"
"No, honey," she said. "My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but
it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five." She turned her
eyes-dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression-upon him. "There.
You don't need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can
subtract, you can figure it out for yourself."
"It doesn't matter," Eddie said. "Time is a face on the water."
Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere- perhaps in a
glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here-a rustie
had just walked over his grave.
SIX
"Has to be cash," Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.
"Huh?" Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.
"Cash," Jake repeated. "No one'd honor a check, even a cashier's check,
that was thirteen years old. Especially not one for millions of
dollars."
"How do you know stuff like that, sug?" Susannah asked.
Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn't), he was Elmer
Chambers's son. Elmer Chambers wasn't one of the world's good
guys-Roland would never call him part of the White-but he had been
a master of what network execs called "the kill." A Big Coffin Hunter
in TVLand, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying
that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not
unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn't forgotten the
face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn't
so.
"Cash, by all means cash," Eddie said, breaking the silence. "A deal
like this has to be cash. If there's a check, we cash it in 1964, not
1977. Stick it in a gym-bag-did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze?
Never mind. Doesn't matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977.
Doesn't have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and
Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close."
"And it can't be after July fifteenth of '77," Jake put in.
"God, no," Eddie agreed. "We'd be all too likely to find Balazar'd
persuaded Tower to sell, and there we'd be, bag of cash in one hand,
thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of
day."
There was a moment of silence-perhaps they were considering this
lurid image-and then Roland said, "You make it sound very easy, and
why not? To you three, the concept of doorways between this world and
your world of tack-sees and astin and fottergrafs seems almost as
mundane as riding a mule would to me. Or strapping on a sixgun. And
there's good reason for you to feel that way. Each of you has been
through one of these doors. Eddie has actually gone both ways-into
this world and then back into his own."
"I gotta tell you that the return trip to New York wasn't much fun,"
Eddie said. "Too much gunplay." Not to mention my brother's severed
head rolling across the floor ofBalazar's office.
"Neither was getting through the door on Dutch Hill," Jake added.
Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own. "All my
life I've accepted what you said the first time I knew you, Jake-what
you said when you were dying."
Jake looked down, pale and without answer. He did not like to recall
that (it was mercifully hazy in any case), and knew that Roland didn't,
either. Good! he thought. You shouldn't want to remember! You let me
drop! You let me die!
"You said there were other worlds than these," Roland said, "and there
are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we
are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no
doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the
rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or-"
"Or it's another door," Susannah murmured. "One that opens on the Dark
Tower itself."
Roland nodded. "The idea has done more than cross my mind. In any case,
the Manni know of these other worlds, and in some fashion have
dedicated their lives to them. They believe todash to be the holiest of
rites and most exalted of states. My father and his friends have long
known of the glass balls; this I have told you. That the Wizard's
Rainbow, todash, and these magical doors may all be much the same is
something we have guessed."
"Where you going with this, sug?" Susannah asked.
"I'm simply reminding you that I have wandered long," Roland said.
"Because of changes in time-a softening of time which I know you all
have felt-I've quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand
years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may
cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the
foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors
between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of
the Western Sea. I had no idea what they were, although I could have
told you something of todash and the bends o' the rainbow."
Roland looked at them earnestly.
"You speak as though my world were as filled with magical doorways as
yours is with..." He thought about it. "... with airplanes or
stage-buses. That's not so."
"Where we are now isn't the same as anywhere you've been before,
Roland," Susannah said. She touched his deeply tanned wrist, her
fingers gentle. "We're not in your world anymore. You said so yourself,
back in that version of Topeka where Blaine finally blew his top."
"Agreed," Roland said. "I only want you to realize that such doors may
be far more rare than you realize. And now you're speaking not of one
but two. Doors you can aim in time, the way you'd aim a gun."
I do not aim with my hand, Eddie thought, and shivered a little. "When
you put it that way, Roland, it does sound a little iffy."
"Then what do we do next?" Jake asked.
"I might be able to help you with that," a voice said.
They all turned, only Roland without surprise. He had heard the
stranger when he arrived, about halfway through their palaver. Roland
did turn with interest, however, and one look at the man standing
twenty feet from them on the edge of the road was enough to tell him
that the newcomer was either from the world of his new friends, or from
one right next door.
"Who are you?" Eddie asked.
"Where are your friends?" Susannah asked.
"Where are you from?" Jake asked. His eyes were alight with eagerness.
The stranger wore a long black coat open over a dark shirt with a
notched collar. His hair was long and white, sticking up on the sides
and in front as if scared. His forehead was marked with a T-shaped
scar. "My friends are still back there a little piece," he said, and
jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the woods in a deliberately
nonspecific way. "I now call Calla Bryn Sturgis my home. Before that,
Detroit, Michigan, where I worked in a homeless shelter, making soup
and running AA meetings. Work I knew quite well. Before that-for a
short while-Topeka, Kansas."
He observed the way the three younger ones started at that with a kind
of interested amusement.
"Before that, New York City. And before that, a little town called
Jerusalem's Lot, in the state of Maine."
SEVEN
"You're from our side," Eddie said. He spoke in a kind of sigh. "Holy
God, you're really from our side!"
"Yes, I think I am," the man in the turned-around collar said. "My name
is Donald Callahan."
"You're a priest," Susannah said. She looked from the cross that hung
around his neck-small and discreet, but gleaming gold-to the
larger, cruder one that scarred his forehead.
Callahan shook his head. "No more. Once. Perhaps one day again, with
the blessing, but not now. Now I'm just a man of God. May I ask... when
are you from?"
"1964," Susannah said.
"1977," Jake said.
"1987," Eddie said.
Callahan's eyes gleamed at that. "1987. And I came here in 1983,
counting as we did then. So tell me something, young man, something
very important. Had the Red Sox won the World Series yet when you
left?"
Eddie threw back his head and laughed. The sound was both surprised and
cheerful. "No, man, sorry. They came within one out of it last
year-at Shea Stadium this was, against the Mets-and then this guy
named Bill Buckner who was playing first base let an easy grounder get
through his wickets. He'll never live it down. Come on over here and
sit down, what do you say? There's no coffee, but Roland-that's this
beat-up-lookin guy on my right-makes a pretty fair cup of woods tea."
Callahan turned his attention to Roland and then did an amazing thing:
dropped to one knee, lowered his head slightly, and put his fist
against his scarred brow. "Hile, gunslinger, may we be well-met on the
path."
"Hile," Roland said. "Come forward, good stranger, and tell us of your
need."
Callahan looked up at him, surprised.
Roland looked back at him calmly, and nodded. "Well-met or ill, it may
be you will find what you seek."
"And you may also," Callahan said.
"Then come forward," Roland said. "Come forward and join our palaver."
EIGHT
"Before we really get going, can I ask you something?"
This was Eddie. Beside him, Roland had built up the fire and was
rummaging in their combined gunna for the little earthen pot-an
artifact of the Old People-in which he liked to brew tea.
"Of course, young man."
"You're Donald Callahan."
"Yes."
"What's your middle name?"
Callahan cocked his head a litde to the side, raised one eyebrow,
then smiled. "Frank. After my grandfather. Does it signify?"
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake shared a look. The thought that went with it
flowed effordessly among them: Donald Frank Callahan. Equals nineteen.
"It does signify," Callahan said.
"Perhaps," Roland said. "Perhaps not." He poured water for the tea,
manipulating the waterskin easily.
"You seem to have suffered an accident," Callahan said, looking at
Roland's right hand.
"I make do," Roland said.
"Gets by with a little help from his friends, you might say," Jake
added, not smiling.
Callahan nodded, not understanding and knowing he need not: they were
ka-tet. He might not know that particular term, but the term didn't
matter. It was in the way they looked at each other and moved around
each other.
"You know my name," Callahan said. "May I have the pleasure of knowing
yours?"
They introduced themselves: Eddie and Susannah Dean, of New York; Jake
Chambers, of New York; Oy of Mid-World; Roland Deschain, of Gilead that
was. Callahan nodded to each in turn, raising his closed fist to his
forehead.
"And to you comes Callahan, of the Lot," he said when the introductions
were done. "Or so I was. Now I guess I'm just the Old Fella. That's
what they call me in the Calla."
"Won't your friends join us?" Roland said. "We haven't a great deal to
eat, but there's always tea."
"Perhaps not just yet."
"Ah," Roland said, and nodded as if he understood.
"In any case, we've eaten well," Callahan said. "It's been a good year
in the Calla-until now, anyway-and we'll be happy to share what we
have." He paused, seemed to feel he had gone too far too fast, and
added: "Mayhap. If all goes well."
"If," Roland said. "An old teacher of mine used to call it the only
word a thousand letters long."
Callahan laughed. "Not bad! In any case, we're probably better off for
food than you are. We also have fresh muffin-balls- Zalia found
em-but I suspect you know about those. She said the patch, although
large, had a picked-over look."
"Jake found them," Roland said.
"Actually, it was Oy," Jake said, and stroked the bumbler's head. "I
guess he's sort of a muffin-hound."
"How long have you known we were here?" Callahan asked.
"Two days."
Callahan contrived to look both amused and exasperated. "Since we cut
your trail, in other words. And we tried to be so crafty."
"If you didn't think you needed someone craftier than you are, you
wouldn't have come," Roland said.
Callahan sighed. "You say true, I say thankya."
"Do you come for aid and succor?" Roland asked. There was only mild
curiosity in his voice, but Eddie Dean felt a deep, deep chill. The
words seemed to hang there, full of resonance. Nor was he alone in
feeling that. Susannah took his right hand. A moment later Jake's hand
crept into Eddie's left.
"That is not for me to say." Callahan sounded suddenly hesitant and
unsure of himself. Afraid, maybe.
"Do you know you come to the line of Eld?" Roland asked in that same
curiously gentle voice. He stretched a hand toward Eddie, Susannah, and
Jake. Even toward Oy. "For these are mine, sure. As I am theirs. We are
round, and roll as we do. And you know what we are."
"Are you?" Callahan asked. "Are you all?"
Susannah said, "Roland, what are you getting us into?"
"Naught be zero, naught be free," he said. "I owe not you, nor you owe
me. At least for now. They have not decided to ask."
They will, Eddie thought. Dreams of the rose and the deli and little
todash-jaunts aside, he didn't think of himself as particularly
psychic, but he didn't need to be psychic to know that they-the
people from whom this Callahan had come as representative-would ask.
Somewhere chestnuts had fallen into a hot fire, and Roland was supposed
to pull them out.
But not just Roland.
You've made a mistake here, Pops, Eddie thought. Perfectly
understandable, hit a mistake, all the same. We're not the cavalry.
We're not the posse. We're not gunslingers. We're just three lost souls
from the Big Apple who-
But no. No. Eddie had known who they were since River Crossing, when
the old people had knelt in the street to Roland. Hell, he'd known
since the woods (what he still thought of as Shardik's Woods), where
Roland had taught them to aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill
with the heart. Not three, not four. One. That Roland should finish
them so, complete them so, was horrible. He was filled with poison and
had kissed them with his poisoned lips. He had made them gunslingers,
and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of
Arthur Eld in this mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would
simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got
to Roland's Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? Well, guess
again.
It was Jake who said what was in Eddie's mind, and Eddie didn't like
the look of excitement in the boy's eyes. He guessed plenty of kids had
gone off to plenty of wars with that same excited gonna-kick-some-ass
look on their faces. Poor kid didn't know he'd been poisoned, and that
made him pretty dumb, because no one should have known better.
"They will, though," he said. "Isn't that true, Mr. Callahan? They will
ask."
"I don't know," Callahan said. "You'd have to convince them..."
He trailed off, looking at Roland. Roland was shaking his head.
"That's not how it works," the gunslinger said. "Not being from
Mid-World you may not know that, but that's not how it works.
Convincing isn't what we do. We deal in lead."
Callahan sighed deeply, then nodded. "I have a book. Tales of Arthur,
it's called."
Roland's eyes gleamed. "Do you? Do you, indeed? I would like to see
such a book. I would like it very well."
"Perhaps you shall," Callahan said. "The stories in it are certainly
not much like the tales of the Round Table I read as a boy, but..." He
shook his head. "I understand what you're saying to me, let's leave it
at that. There are three questions, am I right? And you just asked me
the first."
"Three, yes," Roland said. "Three is a number of power."
Eddie thought, If you want to try a real number of power, Roland old
buddy, try nineteen.
"And all three must be answered yes."
Roland nodded. "And if they are, you may ask no more. We may be cast
on, sai Callahan, but no man may cast us back. Make sure your
people"-he nodded toward the woods south of them-"understand that."
"Gunslinger-"
"Call me Roland. We're at peace, you and I."
"All right, Roland. Hear me well, do ya, I beg. (For so we say in the
Calla.) We who come to you are only half a dozen. We six cannot decide.
Only the Calla can decide."
"Democracy," Roland said. He pushed his hat back from his forehead,
rubbed his forehead, and sighed.
"But if we six agree-especially sai Overholser-" He broke off,
looking rather warily at Jake. "What? Did I say something?"
Jake shook his head and motioned Callahan to continue.
"If we six agree, it's pretty much a done deal."
Eddie closed his eyes, as if in bliss. "Say it again, pal."
Callahan eyed him, puzzled and wary. "What?"
"Done deal. Or anything from your where and when." He paused. "Our side
of the big ka."
Callahan considered this, then began to grin. "I didn't know whether to
shit or go blind," he said. "I went on a bender, broke the bank, kicked
the bucket, blew my top, walked on thin ice, rode the pink horse down
nightmare alley. Like that?"
Roland looked puzzled (perhaps even a little bored), but Eddie Dean's
face was a study in bliss. Susannah and Jake seemed caught somewhere
between amusement and a kind of surprised, recollective sadness.
"Keep em coming, pal," Eddie said hoarsely, and made a come on, man
gesture with both hands. He sounded as if he might have been speaking
through a throatful of tears. "Just keep em coming."
"Perhaps another time," Callahan said gently. "Another time we may sit
and have our own palaver about the old places and ways of saying.
Baseball, if it do ya. Now, though, time is short."
"In more ways than you know, maybe," Roland said. "What would you have
of us, sai Callahan? And now you must speak to the point, for I've told
you in every way I can that we are not wanderers your friends may
interview, then hire or not as they do their farmhands or
saddle-tramps."
"For now I ask only that you stay where you are and let me bring them
to you," he said. "There's Tian Jaffords, who's really responsible for
us being out here, and his wife, Zalia. There's Overholser, the one who
most needs to be convinced that we need you."
"We won't convince him or anyone," Roland said.
"I understand," Callahan said hastily. "Yes, you've made that perfectly
clear. And there's Ben Slightman and his boy, Benny. Ben the Younger is
an odd case. His sister died four years ago, when she and Benny were
both ten. No one knows if that makes Ben the Younger a twin or a
singleton." He stopped abruptly. "I've wandered. I'm sorry."
Roland gestured with an open palm to show it was all right.
"You make me nervous, hear me I beg."
"You don't need to beg us nothing, sugar," Susannah said.
Callahan smiled. "It's only the way we speak. In the Calla, when you
meet someone, you may say, 'How from head to feet, do ya, I beg?' And
the answer, 'I do fine, no rust, tell the gods thankee-sai.' You
haven't heard this?"
They shook their heads. Although some of the words were familiar, the
overall expressions only underlined the fact that they had come to
somewhere else, a place where talk was strange and customs perhaps
stranger.
"What matters," Callahan said, "is that the borderlands are terrified
of creatures called the Wolves, who come out of Thunderclap once a
generation and steal the children. There's more to it, but that's the
crux. Tian Jaffords, who stands to lose not just one child this time
but two, says no more, the time has come to stand and fight.
Others-men like Overholser-say doing that would be disaster. I
think Overholser and those like him would have carried the day, but
your coming has changed things." He leaned forward earnestly. "Wayne
Overholser isn't a bad man, just a frightened man. He's the biggest
farmer in the Calla, and so he has more to lose than some of the rest.
But if he could be convinced that we might drive the Wolves off... that
we could actually win against them... I believe he might also stand and
fight."
"I told you-" Roland began.
"You don't convince," Callahan broke in. "Yes, I understand. I do. But
if they see you, hear you speak, and then convince themselves... ?"
Roland shrugged. "There'll be water if God wills it, we say."
Callahan nodded. "They say it in the Calla, too. May I move on to
another, related matter?"
Roland raised his hands slightly-as if, Eddie thought, to tell
Callahan it was his nickel.
For a moment the man with the scar on his brow said nothing. When he
did speak, his voice had dropped. Eddie had to lean forward to hear
him. "I have something. Something you want. That you may need. It has
reached out to you already, I think."
"Why do you say so?" Roland asked.
Callahan wet his lips and then spoke a single word: "Todash."
NINE
"What about it?" Roland asked. "What about todash?"
"Haven't you gone?" Callahan looked momentarily unsure of himself.
"Haven't any of you gone?"
"Say we have," Roland said. "What's that to you, and to your problem in
this place you call the Calla?"
Callahan sighed. Although it was still early in the day, he looked
tired. "This is harder than I thought it would be," he said, "and by
quite a lot. You are considerably more-what's the word?-trig, I
suppose. More trig than I expected."
"You expected to find nothing but saddle-tramps with fast hands and
empty heads, isn't that about the size of it?" Susannah asked. She
sounded angry. "Well, joke's on you, honeybunch. Anyway, we may be
tramps, but we got no saddles. No need for saddles with no horses."
"We've brought you horses," Callahan said, and that was enough. Roland
didn't understand everything, but he thought he now had enough to
clarify the situation quite a bit. Callahan had known they were coming,
known how many they were, known they were walking instead of riding.
Some of those things could have been passed on by spies, but not all.
And todash... knowing that some or all of them had gone todash...
"As for empty heads, we may not be the brightest four on the planet,
but-" She broke off suddenly, wincing. Her hands went to her stomach.
"Suze?" Eddie asked, instantly concerned. "Suze, what is it? You okay?"
"Just gas," she said, and gave him a smile. To Roland that smile didn't
look quite real. And he thought he saw tiny lines of strain around the
corners of her eyes. "Too many muffin-balls last night." And before
Eddie could ask her any more questions, Susannah turned her attention
back to Callahan. "You got something else to say, then say it, sugar."
"All right," Callahan said. "I have an object of great power. Although
you are still many wheels from my church in the Calla, where this
object is hidden, I think it's already reached out to you. Inducing the
todash state is only one of the things it does." He took a deep breath
and let it out. "If you will render us-for the Calla is my town now,
too, ye ken, where I hope to finish my days and then be buried-the
service I beg, I will give you this... this thing."
"For the last time, I'd ask you to speak no more so," Roland said. His
tone was so harsh that Jake looked around at him with dismay. "It
dishonors me and my ka-tet. We're bound to do as you ask, if we judge
your Calla in the White and those you call Wolves as agents of the
outer dark: Beam-breakers, if you ken. We may take no reward for our
services, and you must not offer. If one of your own mates were to
speak so-the one you call Tian or the one you call Overholster-"
(Eddie thought to correct the gunslinger's pronunciation and then
decided to keep his mouth shut-when Roland was angry, it was usually
best to stay silent.)
"-that would be different. They know nothing but legends, mayhap. But
you, sai, have at least one book which should have taught you better. I
told you we deal in lead, and so we do. But that doesn't make us hired
guns."
"All right, all right-"
"As for what you have," Roland said, his voice rising and overriding
Callahan's, "you'd be rid of it, would you not? It terrifies you, does
it not? Even if we decide to ride on past your town, you'd beg us to
take it with us, would you not? Would you not?"
"Yes," Callahan said miserably. "You speak true and I say thankee.
But... it's just that I heard a bit of your palaver... enough to know
you want to go back... to pass over, as the Manni say... and not just
to one place but two... or maybe more... and time... I heard you speak
of aiming time like a gun...''
Jake's face filled with understanding and horrified wonder. "Which one
is it?" he asked. "It can't be the pink one from Mejis, because Roland
went inside it, it never sent him todash. So which one?"
A tear spilled down Callahan's right cheek, then another. He wiped them
away absently. "I've never dared handle it, but I've seen it. Felt its
power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the
floorboards of my church. And it's come alive. Do you understand me?"
He looked at them with his wet eyes. "It's come alive."
Callahan put his face in his hands, hiding it from them.
TEN
When the holy man with the scar on his forehead left to get his
trailmates, the gunslinger stood watching him go without moving.
Roland's thumbs were hooked into the waistband of his old patched
jeans, and he looked as if he could stand that way well into the next
age. The moment Callahan was out of sight, however, he turned to his
own mates and made an urgent, almost bearish, clutching gesture at the
air: Come to me. As they did, Roland squatted on his hunkers. Eddie and
Jake did the same (and to Susannah, hunkers were almost a way of life).
The gunslinger spoke almost curtly.
"Time is short, so tell me, each of you, and don't shillyshally:
honest or not?"
"Honest," Susannah said at once, then gave another little wince and
rubbed beneath her left breast.
"Honest," said Jake.
"Onnes," said Oy, although he had not been asked.
"Honest," Eddie agreed, "but look." He took an unburned twig from the
edge of the campfire, brushed away a patch of pine-duff, and wrote in
the black earth underneath:
Calla Callahan
"Live or Memorex?" Eddie said. Then, seeing Susannah's confusion: "Is
it a coincidence, or does it mean something?"
"Who knows?" Jake asked. They were all speaking in low tones, heads
together over the writing in the dirt. "It's like nineteen."
"I think it's only a coincidence," Susannah said. "Surely not
everything we encounter on our path is ka, is it? I mean, these don't
even sound the same." And she pronounced them, Calla with the tongue
up, making the broad-a sound, Callahan with the tongue down, making a
much sharper a-sound. " Calla's Spanish in our world... like many of
the words you remember from Mejis, Roland. It means street or square, I
think... don't hold me to it, because high school Spanish is far behind
me now. But if I'm right, using the word as a prefix for the name of a
town-or a whole series of them, as seems to be the case in these
parts-makes pretty good sense. Not perfect, but pretty good.
Callahan, on the other hand..." She shrugged. "What is it? Irish?
English?"
"It's sure not Spanish," Jake said. "But the nineteen thing-"
"Piss on nineteen," Roland said rudely. "This isn't the time for number
games. He'll be back here with his friends in short order, and I would
speak to you an-tet of another matter before he does."
"Do you think he could possibly be right about Black Thirteen?" Jake
asked.
"Yes," Roland said. "Based just on what happened to you and Eddie last
night, I think the answer is yes. Dangerous for us to have such a thing
if he is right, but have it we must. I fear these Wolves out of
Thunderclap will if we don't. Never mind, that need not trouble us
now."
Yet Roland looked very troubled indeed. He turned his regard toward
Jake.
"You started when you heard the big farmer's name. So did you, Eddie,
although you concealed it better."
"Sorry," Jake said. "I have forgotten the face of-"
"Not even a bit have you," Roland said. "Unless I have, as well.
Because I've heard the name myself, and recently. I just can't remember
where." Then, reluctantly: "I'm getting old."
"It was in the bookstore," Jake said. He took his pack, fiddled
nervously with the straps, undid them. He flipped the pack open as he
spoke. It was as if he had to make sure Charlie the Choo-Chooand
Riddle-De-Dumwere still there, still real. "The Manhattan Restaurant of
the Mind. It's so weird. Once it happened to me and once I watched it
happen to me. That'd make a pretty good riddle all by itself."
Roland made a rapid rotating gesture with his diminished right hand,
telling him to go on and be quick.
"Mr. Tower introduced himself," Jake said, "and then I did the same.
Jake Chambers, I said. And he said-"
" 'Good handle, partner,'" Eddie broke in. "That's what he said. Then
he said Jake Chambers sounded like the name of the hero in a Western
novel."
" 'The guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, then
moves on,'"Jake quoted. "And then he said, 'Something by Wayne D.
Overholser, maybe.' " He looked at Susannah and repeated it. "Wayne D.
Overholser. And if you tell me that's a coincidence, Susannah..." He
broke into a sunny, sudden grin. "I'll tell you to kiss my white-boy
ass."
Susannah laughed. "No need of that, sass-box. I don't believe it's a
coincidence. And when we meet Callahan's farmer friend, I intend to ask
him what his middle name is. I set my warrant that it'll not only begin
with D, it'll be something like Dean or Dane, just four letters-" Her
hand went back to the place below her breast. "This gas! My! What I
wouldn't give for a roll of Tums or even a bottle of-" She broke off
again. "Jake, what is it? What's wrong?"
Jake was holding Charlie the Choo-Choo in his hands, and his face had
gone dead white. His eyes were huge, shocked. Beside him, Oy whined
uneasily. Roland leaned over to look, and his eyes also widened.
"Good gods," he said.
Eddie and Susannah looked. The title was the same. The picture was the
same: an anthropomorphic locomotive puffing up a hill, its cowcatcher
wearing a grin, its headlight a cheerful eye.
But the yellow letters across the bottom, Story and Pictures by Beryl
Evans, were gone. There was no credit line there at all.
Jake turned the book and looked at the spine. It said Charlie the
Choo-Choo and McCauley House, Publishers. Nothing else.
South of them now, the sound of voices. Callahan and his friends,
approaching. Callahan from the Calla. Callahan of the Lot, he had also
called himself.
"Title page, sugar," Susannah said. "Look there, quick."
Jake did. Once again there was only the title of the story and the
publisher's name, this time with a colophon.
"Look at the copyright page," Eddie said.
Jake turned the page. Here, on the verso of the title page and beside
the recto where the story began, was the copyright information. Except
there was no information, not really.
Copyright 1936, it said. Numbers which added up to nineteen. The rest
was blank.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 24 Feb 2005 08:07:03 -0800
--------
Chapter V: OVERHOLSER
ONE
Susannah was able to observe a good deal on that long and interesting
day, because Roland gave her the chance and because, after her
morning's sickness passed off, she felt wholly herself again.
Just before Callahan and his party drew within earshot, Roland murmured
to her, "Stay close to me, and not a word from you unless I prompt it.
If they take you for my sh'veen, let it be so."
Under other circumstances, she might have had something pert to say
about the idea of being Roland's quiet little side-wife, his nudge in
the night, but there was no time this morning, and in any case, it was
far from a joking matter; the seriousness in his face made that clear.
Also, the part of the faithful, quiet second appealed to her. In truth,
any part appealed to her. Even as a child, she had rarely been so happy
as when pretending to be someone else.
Which probably explains all there is about you worth knowing, sugar,
she thought.
"Susannah?" Roland asked. "Do you hear me?"
"Hear you well," she told him. "Don't you worry about me."
"If it goes as I want, they'll see you little and you'll see them
much."
As a woman who'd grown up black in mid-twentieth-century America
(Odetta had laughed and applauded her way through Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, often rocking back and forth in her seat like one who
has been visited by a revelation), Susannah knew exactly what he
wanted. And would give it to him. There was a part of her-a spiteful
Detta Walker part-that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her
heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he
was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.
TWO
Watching Roland make the introductions (Susannah was presented dead
last, after Jake, and almost negligendy), she had time to reflect on
how fine she felt now that the nagging gas-pains in her left side had
departed. Hell, even the lingering headache had gone its way, and that
sucker had been hanging around-sometimes in the back of her head,
sometimes at one temple or the other, sometimes just above her left
eye, like a migraine waiting to hatch-for a week or more. And of
course there were the mornings. Every one found her feeling nauseated
and with a bad case of jelly-leg for the first hour or so. She never
vomited, but for that first hour she always felt on the verge of it.
She wasn't stupid enough to mistake such symptoms, but had reason to
know they meant nothing. She just hoped she wouldn't embarrass herself
by swelling up as her Mama's friend Jessica had done, not once but
twice. Two false pregnancies, and in both cases that woman had looked
ready to bust out twins. Triplets, even. But of course Jessica
Beasley's periods had stopped, and that made it all too easy for a
woman to believe she was with child. Susannah knew she wasn't pregnant
for the simplest of reasons: she was still menstruating. She had begun
a period on the very day they had awakened back on the Path of the
Beam, with the Green Palace twenty-five or thirty miles behind them.
She'd had another since then. Both courses had been exceptionally
heavy, necessitating the use of many rags to soak up the dark flow, and
before then her menses had always been light, some months no more than
a few of the spots her mother called "a lady's roses." Yet she didn't
complain, because before her arrival in this world, her periods had
usually been painful and sometimes excruciating. The two she'd had
since returning to the Path of the Beam hadn't hurt at all. If not for
the soaked rags she'd carefully buried to one side of their path or the
other, she wouldn't have had a clue that it was her time of the month.
Maybe it was the purity of the water.
Of course she knew what all this was about; it didn't take a rocket
scientist, as Eddie sometimes said. The crazy, scrambled dreams she
couldn't recall, the weakness and nausea in the mornings, the transient
headaches, the strangely fierce gas attacks and occasional cramps all
came down to the same thing: she wanted his baby. More than anything
else in the world, she wanted Eddie Dean's chap growing in her belly.
What she didn't want was to puff up in a humiliating false pregnancy.
Never mind all that now, she thought as Callahan approached with the
others. Right now you've got to watch. Got to see what Roland and Eddie
and Jake don't see. That way nothing gets dropped. And she felt she
could do that job very well.
Really, she had never felt finer in her life.
THREE
Callahan came first. Behind him were two men, one who looked about
thirty and another who looked to Susannah nearly twice that. The older
man had heavy cheeks that would be jowls in another five years or so,
and lines carving their courses from the sides of his nose down to his
chin. "I-want lines," her father would have called them (and Dan Holmes
had had a pretty good set of his own). The younger man wore a battered
sombrero, the older a clean white Stetson that made Susannah want to
smile-it looked like the kind of hat the good guy would wear in an
old black-and-white Western movie. Still, she guessed a lid like that
didn't come cheap, and she thought the man wearing it had to be Wayne
Overholser. "The big farmer," Roland had called him. The one that had
to be convinced, according to Callahan.
But not by us, Susannah thought, which was sort of a relief. The tight
mouth, the shrewd eyes, and most of all those deep-carved lines (there
was another slashed vertically into his brow, just above the eyes)
suggested sai Overholser would be a pain in the ass when it came to
convincing.
Just behind these two-specifically behind the younger of the
two-there came a tall, handsome woman, probably not black but
nonetheless nearly as dark-skinned as Susannah herself. Bringing up the
rear was an earnest-looking man in spectacles and farmer's clothes and
a likely-looking boy probably two or three years older than Jake. The
resemblance between this pair was impossible to miss; they had to be
Slightman the Elder and Younger.
Boy may be older than Jake in years, she thought, but he's got a soft
bok about him, all the same. True, but not necessarily a bad thing.
Jake had seen far too much for a boy not yet in his teens. Done too
much, as well.
Overholser looked at their guns (Roland and Eddie each wore one of the
big revolvers with the sandalwood grips; the .44 Ruger from New York
City hung under Jake's arm in what Roland called a docker's clutch),
then at Roland. He made a perfunctory salute, his half-closed fist
skimming somewhere at least close to his forehead. There was no bow. If
Roland was offended by this, it didn't show on his face. Nothing showed
on his face but polite interest.
"Hile, gunslinger," the man who had been walking beside Overholser
said, and this one actually dropped to one knee, with his head down and
his brow resting on his fist. "I am Tian Jaffords, son of Luke. This
lady is my wife, Zalia."
"Hile," Roland said. "Let me be Roland to you, if it suits. May your
days be long upon the earth, sai Jaffords."
"Tian. Please. And may you and your friends have twice the-"
"I'm Overholser," the man in the white Stetson broke in brusquely.
"We've come to meet you-you and your friends- at the request of
Callahan and young Jaffords. I'd pass the formalities and get down to
business as soon as possible, do ya take no offense, I beg."
"Ask pardon but that's not quite how it is," Jaffords said. "There was
a meeting, and the men of the Calla voted-"
Overholser broke in again. He was, Susannah thought, just that kind of
man. She doubted he was even aware he was doing it. "The town, yes. The
Calla. I've come along with every wish to do right by my town and my
neighbors, but this is a busy time for me, none busier-"
"Charyou tree," Roland said mildly, and although Susannah knew a deeper
meaning for this phrase, one that made her back prickle, Overholser's
eyes lit up. She had her first inkling then of how this day was going
to go.
"Come reap, yessir, say thankee." Off to one side, Callahan was gazing
into the woods with a kind of studied patience. Behind Overholser, Tian
Jaffords and his wife exchanged an embarrassed glance. The Slightmans
only waited and watched. "You understand that much, anyway."
"In Gilead we were surrounded by farms and freeholds," Roland said. "I
got my share of hay and corn in barn. Aye, and sharproot, too."
Overholser was giving Roland a grin that Susannah found fairly
offensive. It said, We know better than that, don't we, sail We're both
men of the world, after all. "Where are you from really, sai Roland?"
"My friend, you need to see an audiologist," Eddie said.
Overholser looked at him, puzzled. "Beg-my-ear?"
Eddie made a there, you see? gesture and nodded. "Exactly what I mean."
"Be still, Eddie," Roland said. Still as mild as milk. "Sai Overholser,
we may take a moment to exchange names and speak a good wish or two,
surely. For that is how civilized, kindly folk behave, is it not?"
Roland paused-a brief, underlining pause- and then said, "With
harriers it may be different, but there are no harriers here."
Overholser's lips pressed together and he looked hard at Roland, ready
to take offense. He saw nothing in the gunslinger's face that offered
it, and relaxed again. "Thankee," he said. "Tian and Zalia Jaffords, as
told-"
Zalia curtsied, spreading invisible skirts to either side of her
battered corduroy pants.
"-and here are Ben Slightman the Elder and Benny the Younger."
The father raised his fist to his forehead and nodded. The son, his
face a study in awe (it was mostly the guns, Susannah surmised), bowed
with his right leg out stiffly in front of him and the heel planted.
"The Old Fella you already know," Overholser finished, speaking with
exactly the sort of offhand contempt at which Overholser himself would
have taken deep offense, had it been directed toward his valued self.
Susannah supposed that when you were the big farmer, you got used to
talking just about any way you wanted. She wondered how far he might
push Roland before discovering that he hadn't been pushing at all.
Because some men couldn't be pushed. They might go along with you for
awhile, but then-
"These are my trailmates," Roland said. "Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers,
of New York. And this is Susannah." He gestured at her without turning
in her direction. Overholser's face took on a knowing, intensely male
look Susannah had seen before. Detta Walker had had a way of wiping
that look off men's faces that she didn't believe sai Overholser would
care for at all.
Nonetheless, she gave Overholser and the rest of them a demure little
smile and made her own invisible-skirts curtsy. She thought hers as
graceful in its way as the one made by Zalia Jaffords, but of course a
curtsy didn't look quite the same when you were missing your lower legs
and feet. The newcomers had marked the part of her that was gone, of
course, but their feelings on that score didn't interest her much. She
did wonder what they thought of her wheelchair, though, the one Eddie
had gotten her in Topeka, where Blaine the Mono had finished up. These
folks would never have seen the like of it.
Callahan may have, she thought. Because Callahans from our side. He-
The boy said, "Is that a bumbler?"
"Hush, do ya," Slightman said, sounding almost shocked that his son had
spoken.
"That's okay," Jake said. "Yeah, he's a bumbler. Oy, go to him." He
pointed at Ben the Younger. Oy trotted around the campfire to where the
newcomer stood and looked up at the boy with his gold-ringed eyes.
"I never saw a tame one before," Tian said. "Have heard of em, of
course, but the world has moved on."
"Mayhap not all of it has moved on," Roland said. He looked at
Overholser. "Mayhap some of the old ways still hold."
"Can I pat him?" the boy asked Jake. "Will he bite?"
"You can and he won't."
As Slightman the Younger dropped on his hunkers in front of Oy,
Susannah certainly hoped Jake was right. Having a billy-bumbler chomp
off this kid's nose would not set them on in any style at all.
But Oy suffered himself to be stroked, even stretching his long neck up
so he could sample the odor of Slightman's face. The boy laughed. "What
did you say his name was?"
Before Jake could reply, the bumbler spoke for himself. "Oy!"
They all laughed. And as simply as that they were together, well-met on
this road that followed the Path of the Beam. The bond was fragile, but
even Overholser sensed it. And when he laughed, the big farmer looked
as if he might be a good enough fellow. Maybe frightened, and pompous
to be sure, but there was something there.
Susannah didn't know whether to be glad or afraid.
FOUR
"I'd have a word alone with'ee, if it does ya," Overholser said. The
two boys had walked off a little distance with Oy between them,
Slightman the Younger asking Jake if the bumbler could count, as he'd
heard some of them could.
"I think not, Wayne," Jaffords said at once. "It was agreed we'd go
back to our camp, break bread, and explain our need to these folk. And
then, if they agreed to come further-"
"I have no objection to passing a word with sai Overholser." Roland
said, "nor will you, sai Jaffords, I think. For is he not your dinh?"
And then, before Tian could object further (or deny it): "Give these
folks tea, Susannah. Eddie, step over here with us a bit, if it do ya
fine."
This phrase, new to all their ears, came out of Roland's mouth sounding
perfectly natural. Susannah marveled at it. If she had tried saying
that, she would have sounded as if she were sucking up.
"We have food south aways," Zalia said timidly. "Food and graf and
coffee. Andy-"
"We'll eat with pleasure, and drink your coffee with joy," Roland said.
"But have tea first, I beg. We'll only be a moment or two, won't we,
sai?"
Overholser nodded. His look of stern unease had departed. So had his
stiffness of body. From the far side of the road (close to where a
woman named Mia had slipped into the woods only the night before), the
boys laughed as Oy did something clever-Benny with surprise, Jake
with obvious pride.
Roland took Overholser's arm and led him a little piece up the road.
Eddie strolled with them. Jaffords, frowning, made as if to go with
them anyway. Susannah touched his shoulder. "Don't," she said in a low
voice. "He knows what he's doing."
Jaffords looked at her doubtfully for a moment, then came with her.
"P'raps I could build that fire up for you a bit, sai," Slightman the
Elder said with a kindly look at her diminished legs. "For I see a few
sparks yet, so I do."
"If you please," Susannah said, thinking how wonderful all this was.
How wonderful, how strange. Potentially deadly as well, of course, but
she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility
of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
FIVE
Up the road about forty feet from the others, the three men stood
together. Overholser appeared to be doing all the talking, sometimes
gesturing violently to punctuate a point. He spoke as if Roland were no
more than some gunbunny hobo who happened to come drifting down the
road with a few no-account friends riding drogue behind him. He
explained to Roland that Tian Jaffords was a fool (albeit a
well-meaning one) who did not understand the facts of life. He told
Roland that Jaffords had to be restrained, cooled off, not only in his
best interests but in those of the entire Calla. He insisted to Roland
that if anything could be done, Wayne Overholser, son of Alan, would be
first in line to do it; he'd never shirked a chore in his life, but to
go against the Wolves was madness. And, he added, lowering his voice,
speaking of madness, there was the Old Fella. When he kept to his
church and his rituals, he was fine. In such things, a little madness
made a fine sauce. This, however, was summat different. Aye, and by a
long hike.
Roland listened to it all, nodding occasionally. He said almost
nothing. And when Overholser was finally finished, Calla Bryn Sturgis's
big farmer simply looked with a kind of fixed fascination at the gunman
who stood before him. Mostly at those faded blue eyes.
"Are ye what ye say?" he asked finally. "Tell me true, sai."
"I'm Roland of Gilead," the gunslinger said.
"From the line of Eld? Ye do say it?"
"By watch and by warrant," Roland said.
"But Gilead..." Overholser paused. "Gilead's long gone."
"I," Roland said, "am not."
"Would ye kill us all, or cause us to be killed? Tell me, I beg."
"What would you, sai Overholser? Not later; not a day or a week or a
moon from now, but at this minute?"
Overholser stood a long time, looking from Roland to Eddie and then
back to Roland again. Here was a man not used to changing his mind; if
he did so, it would hurt him like a rupture. From down the road came
the laughter of the boys as Oy fetched something Benny had thrown-a
stick almost as big as the bumbler was himself.
"I'd listen," Overholser said at last. "I'd do that much, gods help me,
and say thankee."
"In other words he explained all the reasons why it was a fool's
errand," Eddie told her later, "and then did exactly what Roland wanted
him to do. It was like magic."
"Sometimes Roland is magic," she said.
SIX
The Calla's party had camped in a pleasant hilltop clearing not far
south of the road but just enough off the Path of the Beam so that the
clouds hung still and moveless in the sky, seemingly close enough to
touch. The way there through the woods had been carefully marked; some
of the blazes Susannah saw were as big as her palm. These people might
be crackerjack farmers and stockmen, but it was clear the woods made
them uneasy.
"May I spell ye on that chair a bit, young man?" Overholser asked Eddie
as they began the final push upslope. Susannah could smell roasting
meat and wondered who was tending to the cooking if the entire
Callahan-Overholser party had come out to meet them. Had the woman
mentioned someone named Andy? A servant, perhaps? She had. Overholser's
personal? Perhaps. Surely a man who could afford a Stetson as grand as
the one now tipped back on his head could afford a personal.
"Do ya," Eddie said. He didn't quite dare to add "I beg" (still sounds
phony to him, Susannah thought), but he moved aside and gave over the
wheelchair's push-handles to Overholser. The farmer was a big man, it
was a fair slope, and now he was pushing a woman who weighed close on
to a hundred and thirty pounds, but his breathing, although heavy,
remained regular.
"Might I ask you a question, sai Overholser?" Eddie asked.
"Of course," Overholser replied.
"What's your middle name?"
There was a momentary slackening of forward motion; Susannah put this
down to mere surprise. "That's an odd 'un, young fella; why d'ye ask?"
"Oh, it's a kind of hobby of mine," Eddie said. "In fact, I tell
fortunes by em."
Careful, Eddie, careful, Susannah thought, but she was amused in spite
of herself.
"Oh, aye?"
"Yes," Eddie said. "You, now. I'll bet your middle name begins
with"-he seemed to calculate-"with the letter D." Only he
pronounced it Deh, in the fashion of the Great Letters in the High
Speech. "And I'd say it's short. Five letters? Maybe only four?"
The slackening of forward push came again. "Devil say please!"
Overholser exclaimed. "How'd you know? Tell me!"
Eddie shrugged. "It's no more than counting and guessing, really. In
truth, I'm wrong almost as often as I'm right."
"More often," Susannah said.
"Tell ya my middle name's Dale," Overholser said, "although if anyone
ever explained me why, it's slipped my mind. I lost my folks when I was
young."
"Sorry for your loss," Susannah said, happy to see that Eddie was
moving away. Probably to tell Jake she'd been right about the middle
name: Wayne Dale Overholser. Equals nineteen.
"Is that young man trig or a fool?" Overholser asked Susannah. "Tell
me, I beg, for I canna' tell myself."
"A little of both," she said.
"No question about this push-chair, though, would you say? It's trig as
a compass."
"Say thankya," she said, then gave a small inward sigh of relief. It
had come out sounding all right, probably because she hadn't exactly
planned on saying it.
"Where did it come from?"
"Back on our way a good distance," she said. This turn of the
conversation did not please her much. She thought it was Roland's job
to tell their history (or not tell it). He was their dinh. Besides,
what was told by only one could not be contradicted. Still, she thought
she could say a little more. "There's a thinny. We came from the other
side of that, where things are much different." She craned around to
look at him. His cheeks and neck had flushed, but really, she thought,
he was doing very well for a man who had to be deep into his fifties.
"Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"Yar," he said, hawked, and spat off to the left. "Not that I've seen
or heard it myself, you understand. I never wander far; too much to do
on the farm. Those of the Calla aren't woodsy people as a rule, anyway,
do ya kennit."
Oh yes, I think I kennit, Susannah thought, spying another blaze
roughly the size of a dinner plate. The unfortunate tree so marked
would be lucky to survive the coming winter.
"Andy's told of the thinny many and many-a. Makes a sound, he says, but
can't tell what it is."
"Who's Andy?"
"Ye'll meet him for y'self soon enough, sai. Are'ee from this Calla
York, like yer friends?"
"Yes," she said, again on her guard. He swung her wheelchair around a
hoary old ironwood. The trees were sparser now, and the smell of
cooking much stronger. Meat... and coffee. Her stomach rumbled.
"And they be not gunslingers," Overholser said, nodding at Jake and
Eddie. "You'll not tell me so, surely."
"You must decide that for yourself when the time comes," Susannah said.
He made no reply for a few moments. The wheelchair rumbled over a rock
outcropping. Ahead of them, Oy padded along between Jake and Benny
Slightman, who had made friends with boyhood's eerie speed. She
wondered if it was a good idea. For the two boys were different. Time
might show them how much, and to their sorrow.
"He scared me," Overholser said. He spoke in a voice almost too low to
hear. As if to himself. " 'Twere his eyes, I think. Mostly his eyes."
"Would you go on as you have, then?" Susannah asked. The question was
far from as idle as she hoped it sounded, but she was still starded by
the fury of his response.
"Are'ee mad, woman? Course not-not if I saw a way out of the box
we're in. Hear me well! That boy"-he pointed at Tian Jaffords,
walking ahead of them with his wife-"that boy as much as accused me
of running yella. Had to make sure they all knew I didn't have any
children of the age the Wolves fancy, aye. Not like he has, kennit. But
do'ee think I'm a fool that can't count the cost?"
"Not me," Susannah said, calmly.
"But do he? I halfway think so." Overholser spoke as a man does when
pride and fear are fighting it out in his head. "Do I want to give the
babbies to the Wolves? Babbies that're sent back roont to be a drag on
the town ever after? No! But neither do I want some hardcase to lead us
all to blunder wi' no way back!"
She looked over her shoulder at him and saw a fascinating thing. He now
wanted to say yes. To find a reason to say yes. Roland had brought him
that far, and with hardly a word. Had only... well, had only looked at
him.
There was movement in the corner of her eye. "Holy Christl" Eddie
cried. Susannah's hand darted for a gun that wasn't diere. She turned
forward in the chair again. Coming down the slope toward them, moving
with a prissy care that she couldn't help find amusing even in her
startlement, was a metal man at least seven feet high.
Jake's hand had gone to the docker's clutch and the butt of the gun
that hung thhere.
"Easy, Jake!" Roland said.
The metal man, eyes flashing blue, stopped in front of them. It stood
perfectly still for perhaps ten seconds, plenty of time for Susannah to
read what was stamped on its chest. North Central Positronics, she
thought, back for another curtain call. Not to mention LaMerk
Industries.
Then the robot raised one silver arm, placing a silver hand against its
stainless-steel forehead. "Hile, gunslinger, come from afar," it said.
"Long days and pleasant nights."
Roland raised his fingers to his own forehead. "May you have twice the
number, Andy-sai."
"Thankee." Clickings from its deep and incomprehensible guts. Then it
leaned forward toward Roland, blue eyes flashing brighter. Susannah saw
Eddie's hand creep to the sandalwood grip of the ancient revolver he
wore. Roland, however, never flinched.
"I've made a goodish meal, gunslinger. Many good things from the
fullness of the earth, aye."
"Say thankee, Andy."
"May it do ya fine." The robot's guts clicked again. "In the meantime,
would you perhaps care to hear your horoscope?"
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 24 Feb 2005 08:09:14 -0800
--------
Chapter VI: The Way of the Eld
ONE
At around two in the afternoon of that day, the ten of them sat down to
what Roland called a rancher's dinner. "During the morning chores, you
look forward with love," he told his friends later. "During the evening
ones, you look back with nostalgia."
Eddie thought he was joking, but with Roland you could never be
completely sure. What humor he had was dry to the point of desiccation.
It wasn't the best meal Eddie had ever had, the banquet put on by the
old people in River Crossing still held pride of place in that regard,
but after weeks in the woods, subsisting on gun-slinger burritos (and
shitting hard little parcels of rabbit turds maybe twice a week), it
was fine fare indeed. Andy served out whopping steaks done medium rare
and smothered in mushroom gravy. There were beans on the side, wrapped
things like tacos, and roasted corn. Eddie tried an ear of this and
found it tough but tasty. There was coleslaw which, Tian Jaffords was
at pains to tell them, had been made by his own wife's hands. There was
also a wonderful pudding called strawberry cosy. And of course there
was coffee. Eddie guessed that, among the four of them, they must have
put away at least a gallon. Even Oy had a little. Jake put down a
saucer of the dark, strong brew. Oy sniffed, said "Coff!" and then
lapped it up quickly and efficiently.
There was no serious talk during the meal ("Food and palaver don't mix"
was but one of Roland's many little nuggets of wisdom), and yet Eddie
learned a great deal from Jaffords and his wife, mostly about how life
was lived out here in what Tian and Zalia called "the borderlands."
Eddie hoped Susannah (sitting by Overholser) and Jake (with the
youngster Eddie was already coming to think of as Benny the Kid) were
learning half as much. He would have expected Roland to sit with
Callahan, but Callahan sat with no one. He took his food off a little
distance from all of them, blessed himself, and ate alone. Not very
much, either. Mad at Overholser for taking over the show, or just a
loner by nature? Hard to tell on such short notice, but if someone had
put a gun to his head, Eddie would have voted for the latter.
What struck Eddie with the most force was how goddam civilized this
part of the world was. It made Lud, with its warring Grays and Pubes,
look like the Cannibal Isles in a boy's sea-story. These people had
roads, law enforcement, and a system of government that made Eddie
think of New England town meetings. There was a Town Gathering Hall and
a feather which seemed to be some sort of authority symbol. If you
wanted to call a meeting, you had to send the feather around. If enough
people touched it when it came to their place, there was a meeting. If
they didn't, there wasn't. Two people were sent to carry the feather,
and their count was trusted without question. Eddie doubted if it would
work in New York, but for a place like this it seemed a fine way to run
things.
There were at least seventy other Callas, stretching in a mild arc
north and south of Calla Bryn Sturgis. Calla Bryn Lockwood to the south
and Calla Amity to the north were also farms and ranches. They also had
to endure the periodic depredations of the Wolves. Farther south were
Calla Bryn Bouse and Calla Staffel, containing vast tracts of
ranchland, and Jaffords said they suffered the Wolves as well... at
least he thought so. Farther north, Calla Sen Pinder and Calla Sen
Chre, which were farms and sheep.
"Farms of a good size," Tian said, "but they're smaller as ye go north,
kennit, until ye're in the lands where the snows fall- so I'm told;
I've never seen it myself-and wonderful cheese is made."
"Those of the north wear wooden shoes, or so 'tis said." Zalia told
Eddie, looking a little wistful. She herself wore scuffed clodhoppers
called shor'boots.
The people of the Callas traveled little, but the roads were there if
they wanted to travel, and trade was brisk. In addition to them, there
was the Whye, sometimes called Big River. This ran south of Calla Bryn
Sturgis all the way to the South Seas, or so 'twas said. There were
mining Callas and manufacturing Callas (where things were made by
steam-press and even, aye, by electricity) and even one Calla devoted
to nothing but pleasure: gambling and wild, amusing rides, and...
But here Tian, who had been talking, felt Zalia's eyes on him and went
back to the pot for more beans. And a conciliatory dish of his wife's
slaw.
"So," Eddie said, and drew a curve in the dirt. "These are the
borderlands. The Callas. An arc that goes north and south for... how
far, Zalia?"
" 'Tis men's business, so it is," she said. Then, seeing her own man
was still at the embering fire, inspecting the pots, she leaned forward
a bit toward Eddie. "Do you speak in miles or wheels?"
"A little of both, but I'm better with miles."
She nodded. "Mayhap two thousand miles so"-she pointed north-"and
twice that, so." To the south. She remained that way, pointing in
opposite directions, then dropped her arms, clasped her hands in her
lap, and resumed her former demure pose.
"And these towns... these Callas... stretch the whole way?"
"So we're told, if it please ya, and the traders do come and go.
Northwest of here, the Big River splits in two. We call the east branch
Devar-Tete Whye-the Little Whye, you might say. Of course we see more
river-travel from the north, for the river flows north to south, do ya
see."
"I do. And to the east?"
She looked down. "Thunderclap," she said in a voice Eddie could barely
hear. "None go there."
"Why?"
"It's dark there," said she, still not looking up from her lap. Then
she raised an arm. This time she pointed in the direction from which
Roland and his friends had come. Back toward Mid-World. "There," she
said, "the world is ending. Or so we're told. And there..." She pointed
east and now raised her face to Eddie's. "There, in Thunderclap, it's
already ended. In the middle are we, who only want to go our way in
peace."
"And do you think it will happen?"
"No." And Eddie saw she was crying.
TWO
Shortly after this, Eddie excused himself and stepped into a copse of
trees for a personal moment. When he rose from his squat, reaching for
some leaves with which to clean himself, a voice spoke from directly
behind him.
"Not those, sai, do it please ya. Those be poison flurry. Wipe with
those and how you'll itch."
Eddie jumped and wheeled around, grabbing the waistband of his jeans
with one hand and reaching for Roland's gun-belt, hanging from the
branch of a nearby tree, with the other. Then he saw who had
spoken-or what-and relaxed a little.
"Andy, it's not really kosher to creep up behind people when they're
taking a dump." Then he pointed to a thatch of low green bushes. "What
about those? How much trouble will I get into if I wipe with those?"
There were pauses and clicks.
"What?" Eddie asked. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No," Andy said. "I'm simply processing information, sai. Kosher:
unknown word. Creeping up. I didn't, I walked, if it do ye fine. Taking
a dump, likely slang for the excretion of-"
"Yeah," Eddie said, "that's what it is. But listen-if you didn't
creep up on me, Andy, how come I didn't hear you? I mean, there's
underbrush. Most people make noise when they go through underbrush."
"I am not a person, sai," Andy said. Eddie thought he sounded smug.
"Guy, then. How can a big guy like you be so quiet?"
"Programming," Andy said. "Those leaves will be fine, do ya."
Eddie rolled his eyes, then grabbed a bunch. "Oh yeah. Programming.
Sure. Should have known. Thankee-sai, long days, kiss my ass and go to
heaven."
"Heaven," said Andy. "A place one goes after death; a kind of paradise.
According to the Old Fella, those who go to heaven sitteth at the right
hand of God the Father Almighty, forever and ever."
"Yeah? Who's gonna sit at his left hand? All the Tupperware salesmen?"
"Sai, I don't know. Tupperware is an unknown word to me. Would you like
your horoscope?"
"Why not?" Eddie said. He started back toward the camp, guided by the
sounds of laughing boys and a barking billy-bumbler. Andy towered
beside him, shining even beneath the cloudy sky and seeming to not make
a sound. It was eerie.
"What's your birth date, sai?"
Eddie thought he might be ready for this one. "I'm Goat Moon," he said,
then remembered a little more. "Goat with beard."
"Winter's snow is full of woe, winter's child is strong and wild," said
Andy. Yes, that was smugness in its voice, all right.
"Strong and wild, that's me," Eddie said. "Haven't had a real bath in
over a month, you better believe I'm strong and wild. What else do you
need, Andy old guy? Want to look at my palm, or anything?"
"That will not be necessary, sai Eddie." The robot sounded unmistakably
happy and Eddie thought, That's me, spreading joy wherever I go. Even
robots love me. It's my ka.
"This is Full Earth, say we all thankya. The moon is red, what is
called the Huntress Moon in Mid-World that was. You will travel, Eddie!
You will travel far! You and your friends! This very night you return
to Calla New York. You will meet a dark lady. You-"
"I want to hear more about this trip to New York," Eddie said,
stopping. Just ahead was the camp. He was close enough so he could see
people moving around. "No joking around, Andy."
"You will go todash, sai Eddie! You and your friends. You must be
careful. When you hear the kammen-the chimes, ken ya well-you must
all concentrate on each other. To keep from getting lost."
"How do you know this stuff?" Eddie asked.
"Programming," Andy said. "Horoscope is done, sai. No charge." And
then, what struck Eddie as the final capping lunacy: "Sai
Callahan-the Old Fella, ye ken-says I have no license to tell
fortunes, so must never charge."
"Sai Callahan says true," Eddie said, and then, when Andy started
forward again: "But stay a minute, Andy. Do ya, I beg." It was
absolutely weird how quickly that started to sound okay. Andy stopped
willingly enough and turned toward Eddie, his blue eyes glowing. Eddie
had roughly a thousand questions about todash, but he was currently
even more curious about something else.
"You know about these Wolves."
"Oh, yes. I told sai Tian. He was wroth." Again Eddie detected
something like smugness in Andy's voice... but surely that was just the
way it struck him, right? A robot-even one that had survived from the
old days-couldn't enjoy the discomforts of humans? Could it?
Didn't take you long to forget the mono, did it, sugar? Susannah's
voice asked in his head. Hers was followed by Jake's. Blaine's a pain.
And then, just his own: If you treat this guy like nothing more than a
fortune-telling -machine in a carnival arcade, Eddie old boy, you
deserve whatever you get.
"Tell me about the Wolves," Eddie said.
"What would you know, sai Eddie?"
"Where they come from, for a start. The place where they feel like they
can put their feet up and fart right out loud. Who they work for. Why
they take the kids. And why the ones they take come back ruined." Then
another question struck him. Perhaps the most obvious. "Also, how do
you know when they're coming?"
Clicks from inside Andy. A lot of them this time, maybe a full minute's
worth. When Andy spoke again, its voice was different. It made Eddie
think about Officer Bosconi, back in the neighborhood. Brooklyn Avenue,
that was Bosco Bob's beat. If you just met him, walking along the
street and twirling his nightstick, Bosco talked to you like you were a
human being and so was he-howya doin, Eddie, how's your mother these
days, how's your goodfornothin bro, are you gonna sign up for PAL
Middlers, okay, seeya at the gym, stay off the smokes, have a good day.
But if he thought maybe you'd done something, Bosco Bob turned into a
guy you didn't want to know. That Officer Bosconi didn't smile, and the
eyes behind his glasses were like puddle ice in February (which just
happened to be the Time o' the Goat, over here on this side of the
Great Whatever). Bosco Bob had never hit Eddie, but there were a couple
of times-once just after some kids lit Woo Kim's Market on
fire-when he felt sure that bluesuit mothafuck would have hit him, if
Eddie had been stupid enough to smart off. It wasn't schizophrenia-at
least not of the pure Detta/Odetta kind-but it was close. There were
two versions of Officer Bosconi. One of them was a nice guy. The other
one was a cop.
When Andy spoke again, it no longer sounded like your well-meaning but
rather stupid uncle, the one who believed the alligator-boy and
Elvis-is-alive-in-Buenos-Aires stories Inside View printed were
absolutely true. This Andy sounded emotionless and somehow dead.
Like a real robot, in other words.
"What's your password, sai Eddie?"
"Huh?"
"Password. You have ten seconds. Nine... eight... seven..."
Eddie thought of spy movies he'd seen. "You mean I say something like
'The roses are blooming in Cairo' and you say 'Only in Mrs. Wilson's
garden' and then I say-"
"Incorrect password, sai Eddie... two... one... zero." From within Andy
came a low thudding sound which Eddie found singularly unpleasant. It
sounded like the blade of a sharp cleaver passing through meat and into
the wood of the chopping block beneath. He found himself thinking for
the first time about the Old People, who had surely built Andy (or
maybe the people before the Old People, call them the Really Old
People-who knew for sure?). Not people Eddie himself would want to
meet, if the last remainders in Lud had been any example.
"You may retry once," said the cold voice. It bore a resemblance to the
one that had asked Eddie if Eddie would like his horoscope told, but
that was the best you could call it-a resemblance. "Would you retry,
Eddie of New York?"
Eddie thought fast. "No," he said, "that's all right. The info's
restricted, huh?"
Several clicks. Then: "Restricted: confined, kept within certain set
limits, as information in a given document or q-disc; limited to those
authorized to use that information; those authorized announce
themselves by giving the password." Another pause to think and then
Andy said, "Yes, Eddie. That info's restricted."
"Why?" Eddie asked.
He expected no answer, but Andy gave him one. "Directive Nineteen."
Eddie clapped him on his steel side. "My friend, that don't surprise me
at all. Directive Nineteen it is."
"Would you care to hear an expanded horoscope, Eddie-sai?"
"Think I'll pass."
"What about a tune called 'The Jimmy Juice I Drank Last Night?' It has
many amusing verses." The reedy note of a pitch-pipe came from
somewhere in Andy's diaphragm.
Eddie, who found the idea of many amusing verses somehow alarming,
increased his pace toward the others. "Why don't we just put that on
hold?" he said. "Right now I think I need another cup of coffee."
"Give you joy of it, sai," Andy said. To Eddie he sounded rather
forlorn. Like Bosco Bob when you told him you thought you'd be too busy
for PAL League that summer.
THREE
Roland sat on a stone outcrop, drinking his own cup of coffee. He
listened to Eddie without speaking himself, and with only one small
change of expression: a minute lift of the eyebrows at the words
Directive Nineteen.
Across the clearing from them, Slightman the Younger had produced a
kind of bubble-pipe that made extraordinarily tough bubbles. Oy chased
them, popped several with his teeth, then began to get the hang of what
Slightman seemed to want, which was for him to herd them into a fragile
little pile of light. The bubble-pile made Eddie think of the Wizard's
Rainbow, those dangerous glass balls. And did Callahan really have one?
The worst of the bunch?
Beyond the boys, at the edge of the clearing, Andy stood with his
silver arms folded over the stainless-steel curve of his chest. Waiting
to clean up the meal he had hauled to them and then cooked, Eddie
supposed. The perfect servant. He cooks, he cleans, he tells you about
the dark lady you'll meet. Just don't expect him to violate Directive
Nineteen. Not without the password, anyway.
"Come over to me, folks, would you?" Roland asked, raising his voice
slightly. "Time we had a bit of palaver. Won't be long, which is good,
at least for us, for we've already had our own, before sai Callahan
came to us, and after awhile talk sickens, so it does."
They came over and sat near him like obedient children, those from the
Calla and those who were from far away and would go beyond here perhaps
even farther.
"First I'd hear what you know of these Wolves. Eddie tells me Andy may
not say how he comes by what he knows."
"You say true," Slightman the Elder rumbled. "Either those who made him
or those who came later have mostly gagged him on that subject,
although he always warns us of their coming. On most other subjects,
his mouth runs everlastingly."
Roland looked toward the Calla's big farmer. "Will you set us on, sai
Overholser?"
Tian Jaffords looked disappointed not to be called on. His woman looked
disappointed for him. Slightman the Elder nodded as if Roland's choice
of speaker was only to be expected. Overholser himself did not puff up
as Eddie might have guessed. Instead he looked down at his own crossed
legs and scuffed shor'boots for thirty seconds or so, rubbing at the
side of his face, thinking. The clearing was so quiet Eddie could hear
the minute rasp of the farmer's palm on two or three days' worth of
bristles. At last he sighed, nodded, and looked up at Roland.
"Say thankee. Ye're not what I expected, I must say. Nor your tet."
Overholser turned to Tian. "Ye were right to haul us out here, Tian
Jaffords. This is a meeting we needed to have, and I say thankee."
"It wasn't me got you out here," Jaffords said. "Was the Old Fella."
Overholser nodded to Callahan. Callahan nodded back, then sketched the
shape of a cross in the air with his scarred hand-as if to say, Eddie
thought, that it wasn't him, either, but God. Maybe so, but when it
came to pulling coals out of a hot fire, he'd put two dollars on Roland
of Gilead for every one he put on God and the Man Jesus, those heavenly
gunslingers.
Roland waited, his face calm and perfectly polite.
Finally Overholser began to talk. He spoke for nearly fifteen minutes,
slowly but always to the point. There was the business of the twins, to
begin with. Residents of the Calla realized that children birthed in
twos were the exception rather than the rule in other parts of the
world and at other times in the past, but in their area of the Grand
Crescent it was the singletons, like the Jaffordses' Aaron, who were
the rarities. The great rarities.
And, beginning perhaps a hundred and twenty years ago (or mayhap a
hundred and fifty; with time the way it was, such things were
impossible to pin down with any certainty), the Wolves had begun their
raids. They did not come exactly once every generation; that would have
been each twenty years or so, and it was longer than that. Still, it
was close to that.
Eddie thought of asking Overholser and Slightman how the Old People
could have shut Andy's mouth concerning the Wolves if the Wolves had
been raiding out of Thunderclap for less than two centuries, then
didn't bother. Asking what couldn't be answered was a waste of time,
Roland would have said. Still, it was interesting, wasn't it?
Interesting to wonder when someone (or some thing) had last programmed
Andy the Messenger (Many Other Functions).
And why.
The children, Overholser said, one of each set between the ages of
perhaps three and fourteen, were taken east, into the land of
Thunderclap. (Slightman the Elder put his arm around his boy's
shoulders during this part of the tale, Eddie noticed.) There they
remained for a relatively short period of time- mayhap four weeks,
mayhap eight. Then most of them would be returned. The assumption made
about those few who did not return was that they had died in the Land
of Darkness, that whatever evil rite was performed on them killed a few
instead of just ruining them.
The ones who came back were at best biddable idiots. A five-year-old
would return with all his hard-won talk gone, reduced to nothing but
babble and reaching for the things he wanted. Diapers which had been
left forgotten two or three years before would go back on and might
stay on until such a roont child was ten or even twelve.
"Yer-bugger, Tia still pisses herself one day out of every six, and can
be counted on to shit herself once a moon, as well," Jaffords said.
"Hear him," Overholser agreed gloomily. "My own brother, Welland, was
much the same until he died. And of course they have to be watched more
or less constant, for if they get something they like, they'll eat it
until they bust. Who's watching yours, Tian?"
"My cuz," Zalia said before Tian could speak. "Heddon n Hedda can help
a little now, as well; they've come to a likely enough age-" She
stopped and seemed to realize what she was saying. Her mouth twisted
and she fell silent. Eddie guessed he understood. Heddon and Hedda
could help now, yes. Next year, one of them would still be able to
help. The other one, though...
A child taken at the age of ten might come back with a few rudiments of
language left, but would never get much beyond that. The ones who were
taken oldest were somehow the worst, for they seemed to come back with
some vague understanding of what had been done to them. What had been
stolen from them. These had a tendency to cry a great deal, or to
simply creep off by themselves and peer into the east, like lost
things. As if they might see their poor brains out there, circling like
birds in the dark sky. Half a dozen such had even committed suicide
over the years. (At this, Callahan once more crossed himself.)
The roont ones remained childlike in stature as well as in speech and
behavior until about the age of sixteen. Then, quite suddenly, most of
them sprouted to the size of young giants.
"Ye can have no idea what it's like if ye haven't seen it and been
through it," Tian said. He was looking into the ashes of the fire. 'Ye
can have no idea of the pain it causes them. When a babby cuts his
teeth, ye ken how they cry?"
"Yes," Susannah said.
Tian nodded. "It's as if their whole bodies are teething, kennit."
"Hear him," Overholser said. "For sixteen or eighteen months, all my
brother did was sleep and eat and cry and grow. I can remember him
crying even in his sleep. I'd get out of my bed and go across to him
and there'd be a whispering sound from inside his chest and legs and
head. 'Twere the sound of his bones growing in the night, hear me."
Eddie contemplated the horror of it. You heard stories about
giants-fee-fi-fo-fum, and all that-but until now he'd never
considered what it might be like to become a giant. As if their whole
bodies are teething, Eddie thought, and shivered.
"A year and a half, no longer than that and it were done, but I wonder
how long it must seem to them, who're brought back with no more sense
of time than birds or bugs."
"Endless," Susannah said. Her face was very pale and she sounded ill.
"It must seem endless."
"The whispering in the nights as their bones grow," Overholser said.
"The headaches as their skulls grow."
"Zalman screamed one time for nine days without stopping," Zalia said.
Her voice was expressionless, but Eddie could see the horror in her
eyes; he could see it very well. "His cheekbones pushed up. You could
see it happening. His forehead curved out and out, and if you held an
ear close to it you could hear the skull creaking as it spread. It
sounded like a tree-branch under a weight of ice.
"Nine days he screamed. Nine. Morning, noon, and in the dead of night.
Screaming and screaming. Eyes gushing water. We prayed to all the gods
there were that he'd go hoarse-that he'd be stricken dumb, even-but
none such happened, say thankee. If we'd had a gun, I believe we would
have slew him as he lay on his pallet just to end his pain. As it was,
my good old da' was ready to slit 'een's thr'ut when it stopped. His
bones went on yet awhile-his skellington, do ya-but his head was
the worst of it and it finally stopped, tell gods thankya, and Man
Jesus too."
She nodded toward Callahan. He nodded back and raised his hand toward
her, outstretched in the air for a moment. Zalia turned back to Roland
and his friends.
"Now I have five of my own," she said. "Aaron's safe, and say thankee,
but Heddon and Hedda's ten, a prime age. Lyman and Lia's only five, but
five's old enough. Five's..."
She covered her face with her hands and said no more.
FOUR
Once the growth-spurt was finished, Overholser said, some of them could
be put to work. Others-the majority-weren't able to manage even
such rudimentary tasks as pulling stumps or digging postholes. You saw
these sitting on the steps of look's General Store or sometimes walking
across the countryside in gangling groups, young men and women of
enormous height, weight, and stupidity, sometimes grinning at each
other and babbling, sometimes only goggling up at the sky.
They didn't mate, there was that to be grateful for. While not all of
them grew to prodigious size and their mental skills and physical
abilities might vary somewhat, there seemed to be one universal: they
came back sexually dead. "Beggin your pardon for the crudity,"
Overholser said, "but I don't b'lieve my brother Welland had so much as
a piss-hardon after they brought him back. Zalia? Have you ever seen
your brother with a... you know..."
Zalia shook her head.
"How old were you when they came, sai Overholser?" Roland asked.
"First time, ye mean. Welland and I were nine." Overholser now spoke
rapidly. It gave what he said the air of a rehearsed speech, but Eddie
didn't think that was it. Overholser was a force in Calla Bryn Sturgis;
he was, God save us and stone the crows, the big farmer. It was hard
for him to go back in his mind to a time when he'd been a child, small
and powerless and terrified. "Our Ma and Pa tried to hide us away in
the cellar. So I've been told, anyway. I remember none of it, m'self,
to be sure. Taught myself not to, I's'pose. Yar, quite likely. Some
remember better'n others, Roland, but all the tales come to the same:
one is took, one is left behind. The one took comes back roont, maybe
able to work a little but dead in the b'low the waist. Then... when
they get in their thirties..."
When they reached their thirties, the roont twins grew abruptly,
shockingly old. Their hair turned white and often fell completely out.
Their eyes dimmed. Muscles that had been prodigious (as Tia Jaffords's
and Zalman Hoonik's were now) went slack and wasted away. Sometimes
they died peacefully, in their sleep. More often, their endings weren't
peaceful at all. The sores came, sometimes out on the skin but more
often in the stomach or the head. In the brain. All died long before
their natural span would have been up, had it not been for the Wolves,
and many died as they had grown from the size of normal children to
that of giants: screaming in pain. Eddie wondered how many of these
idiots, dying of what sounded to him like terminal cancer, were simply
smothered or perhaps fed some strong sedative that would take them far
beyond pain, far beyond sleep. It wasn't the sort of question you
asked, but he guessed the answer would have been many. Roland sometimes
used the word delah, always spoken with a light toss of the hand toward
the horizon.
Many.
The visitors from the Calla, their tongues and memories untied by
distress, might have gone on for some time, piling one sorry anecdote
on another, but Roland didn't allow them to. "Now speak of the Wolves,
I beg. How many come to you?"
"Forty," Tian Jaffords said.
"Spread across the whole Calla?" Slightman the Elder asked. "Nay, more
than forty." And to Tian, slightly apologetic: "You were no more'n nine
y'self last time they came, Tian. I were in my young twenties. Forty in
town, maybe, but more came to the outlying farms and ranches. I'd say
sixty in all, Roland-sai, maybe eighty."
Roland looked at Overholser, eyebrows raised.
"It's been twenty-three years, ye mind," Overholser said, "but I'd call
sixty about right."
"You call them Wolves, but what are they really? Are they men? Or
something else?"
Overholser, Slightman, Tian, Zalia: for a moment Eddie could feel them
sharing khef, could almost hear them. It made him feel lonely and
left-out, the way you did when you saw a couple kissing on a
streetcorner, wrapped in each other's arms or looking into each other's
eyes, totally lost in each other's regard. Well, he didn't have to feel
that way anymore, did he? He had his own ka-tet, his own khef. Not to
mention his own woman.
Meanwhile, Roland was making the impatient little finger-twirling
gesture with which Eddie had become so familiar. Come on, folks, it
said, day's wasting.
"No telling for sure what they are," Overholser said. "They look like
men, but they wear masks."
"Wolf-masks," Susannah said.
"Aye, lady, wolf-masks, gray as their horses."
"Do you say all come on gray horses?" Roland asked.
The silence was briefer this time, but Eddie still felt that sense of
khef and ka-tet, minds consulting via something so elemental it
couldn't even rightly be called telepathy; it was more elemental than
telepathy.
"Yer-bugger!" Overholser said, a slang term that seemed to mean You bet
your ass, don't insult me by asking again. "All on gray horses. They
wear gray pants that look like skin. Black boots with cruel big steel
spurs. Green cloaks and hoods. And the masks. We know they're masks
because they've been found left behind. They look like steel but rot in
the sun like flesh, buggerdly things."
"Ah."
Overholser gave him a rather insulting head-cocked-to-one side look,
the sort that asked Are you foolish or just slow? Then Slightman said:
"Their horses ride like the wind. Some have ta'en one babby before the
saddle and another behind."
"Do you say so?" Roland asked.
Slightman nodded emphatically. "Tell gods thankee." He saw Callahan
again make the sign of the cross in the air and sighed. "Beg pardon,
Old Fella."
Callahan shrugged. "You were here before I was. Call on all the gods
you like, so long as you know I think they're false."
"And they come out of Thunderclap," Roland said, ignoring this last.
"Aye," Overholser said. "You can see where it lies over that way about
a hundred wheels." He pointed southeast. "For we come out of the woods
on the last height of land before the Crescent. Ye can see all the
Eastern Plain from there, and beyond it a great darkness, like a rain
cloud on the horizon. 'Tis said, Roland, that in the far long ago, you
could see mountains over there."
"Like the Rockies from Nebraska," Jake breathed.
Overholser glanced at him. "Beg pardon, Jake-soh?"
"Nothing," Jake said, and gave the big farmer a small, embarrassed
smile. Eddie, meanwhile, filed away what Overholser had called him. Not
sai but soh. Just something else that was interesting.
"We've heard of Thunderclap," Roland said. His voice was somehow
terrifying in its lack of emotion, and when Eddie felt Susannah's hand
creep into his, he was glad of it.
" 'Tis a land of vampires, boggarts, and taheen, so the stories say,"
Zalia told them. Her voice was thin, on the verge of trembling. "Of
course the stories are old-"
"The stories are true," Callahan said. His own voice was harsh, but
Eddie heard the fear in it. Heard it very well. "There are
vampires-other things as well, very likely-and Thunderclap's their
nest. We might speak more of this another time, gunslinger, if it does
ya. For now, only hear me, I beg: of vampires I know a good deal. I
don't know if the Wolves take the Calla's children to them-I rather
think not-but yes, there are vampires."
"Why do you speak as if I doubt?" Roland asked.
Callahan's eyes dropped. "Because many do. I did myself. I doubted much
and..." His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and when he finished,
it was almost in a whisper. "... and it was my undoing."
Roland sat quiet for several moments, hunkered on the soles of his
ancient boots with his arms wrapped around his bony knees, rocking back
and forth a litde. Then, to Overholser: "What o' the clock do they
come?"
"When they took Welland, my brother, it was morning," the farmer said.
"Breakfast not far past. I remember, because Welland asked our Ma if he
could take his cup of coffee into the cellar with him. But last time...
the time they come and took Tian's sister and Zalia's brother and so
many others..."
"I lost two nieces and a nephew," Slightman the Elder said.
"That time wasn't long after the noon-bell from the Gathering Hall. We
know the day because Andy knows the day, and that much he tells us.
Then we hear the thunder of their hooves as they come out of the east
and see the rooster-tail of dust they raise-"
"So you know when they're coming," Roland said. "In fact, you know
three ways: Andy, the sound of their hoofbeats, the rise of their
dust."
Overholser, taking Roland's implication, had flushed a dull brick color
up the slopes of his plump cheeks and down his neck. "They come armed,
Roland, do ya. With guns-rifles as well as the revolvers yer own tet
carries, grenados, too-and other weapons, as well. Fearsome weapons
of the Old People. Light-sticks that kill at a touch, flying metal
buzz-balls called drones or sneetches. The sticks burn the skin black
and stop the heart-electrical, maybe, or maybe-"
Eddie heard Overholser's next word as ant-NOMIC. At first he thought
die man was trying to say anatomy. A moment later he realized it was
probably "atomic."
"Once the drones smell you, they follow no matter how fast you run,"
Slightman's boy said eagerly, "or how much you twist and turn. Right,
Da'?"
"Yer-bugger," Slightman the Elder said. "Then sprout blades that whirl
around so fast you can't see em and they cut you apart."
"All on gray horses," Roland mused. "Every one of em the same color.
What else?"
Nothing, it seemed. It was all told. They came out of the east on the
day Andy foretold, and for a terrible hour-perhaps longer-the Calla
was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the
screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that
looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children
were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole,
suggesting that the Wolves' prescience wasn't perfect. Still, it must
have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were
moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always
were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the
bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the
Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the
light-sticks-lasers of some kind?-or cut to pieces by the flying
drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody
little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm, it had been called.
Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like
too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn
and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were
needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes-usually at
night, when sleep was long in coming-a deep part of him still cried
for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as
a stolen child might cry for his mother.
The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come,
and that was the end of it.
"No, can't be," Jake said. "They must bring them back, don't they?"
"No," Overholser said. "The roont ones come back on the train, hear me,
there's a great junkpile of em I could show'ee, and-What? What's
wrong?" Jake's mouth had fallen open, and he'd lost most of his color.
"We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago," Susannah
said. "The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?"
They weren't. Overholser, the Jaffords, and the Slightmans had no idea
what a mono was, in fact. (Callahan, who had been to Disneyland as a
teenager, did.) The trains which brought the children back were hauled
by plain old locomotives (hopefully none of them named Charlie, Eddie
thought), driverless and attached to one or perhaps two open flatcars.
The children were huddled on these. When they arrived they were usually
crying with fear (from sunburns as well, if the weather west of
Thunderclap was hot and clear), covered with food and their own drying
shit, and dehydrated into the bargain. There was no station at the
railhead, although Overholser opined there might have been, centuries
before. Once the children had been offloaded, teams of horses were used
to pull the short trains from the rusty railhead. It occurred to Eddie
that they could figure out the number of times the Wolves had come by
counting the number of junked engines, sort of like figuring out the
age of a tree by counting the rings on the stump.
"How long a trip for them, would you guess?" Roland asked. "Judging
from their condition when they arrive?"
Overholser looked at Slightman, then at Tian and Zalia. "Two days?
Three?"
They shrugged and nodded.
"Two or three days," Overholser said to Roland, speaking with more
confidence than was perhaps warranted, judging from the looks of the
others. "Long enough for sunburns, and to eat most of the rations
they're left-"
"Or paint themselves with em," Slightman grunted.
"-but not long enough to die of exposure," Overholser finished. "If
ye'd judge from that how far they were taken from the Calla, all I can
say is I wish'eejoy of the riddle, for no one knows what speed the
train draws when it's crossing the plains. It comes slow and stately
enough to the far side of the river, but that means little."
"No," Roland agreed, "it doesn't." He considered. "Twenty-seven days
left?"
"Twenty-six now," Callahan said quietly.
"One thing, Roland," Overholser said. He spoke apologetically, but his
jaw was jutting. Eddie thought he'd backslid to the kind of guy you
could dislike on sight. If you had a problem with authority figures,
that was, and Eddie always had.
Roland raised his eyebrows in silent question.
"We haven't said yes." Overholser glanced at Slightman the Elder, as if
for support, and Slightman nodded agreement.
"Ye must ken we have no way of knowing y'are who you say y'are,"
Slightman said, rather apologetically. "My family had no books growing
up, and there's none out at the ranch-I'm foreman of Eisenhart's
Rocking B-except for the stockline books, but growing up I heard as
many tales of Gilead and gunslingers and Arthur Eld as any other boy...
heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend...
but I never heard of a gunslinger missing two of his fingers, or a
brown-skinned woman gunslinger, or one who won't be old enough to shave
for years yet."
His son looked shocked, and in an agony of embarrassment as well.
Slightman looked rather embarrassed himself, but pushed on.
"I cry your pardon if what I say offends, indeed I do-"
"Hear him, hear him well," Overholser rumbled. Eddie was starting to
think that if the man's jaw jutted out much further, it would snap
clean off.
"-but any decision we make will have long echoes. Ye must see it's
so. If we make the wrong one, it could mean the death of our town, and
all in it."
"I can't believe what I'm hearing!" Tian Jaffords cried indignantly.
"Do you think 'ese're a fraud? Good gods, man, have'ee not looked at
him? Do'ee not have-"
His wife grasped his arm hard enough to pinch white marks into his
farmer's tan with the tips of her fingers. Tian looked at her and fell
quiet, though his lips were pressed together tightly.
Somewhere in the distance, a crow called and a rustie answered in its
slightly shriller voice. Then all was silent. One by one they turned to
Roland of Gilead to see how he would reply.
FIVE
It was always the same, and it made him tired. They wanted help, but
they also wanted references. A parade of witnesses, if they could get
them. They wanted rescue without risk, just to close their eyes and be
saved.
Roland rocked slowly back and forth with his arms wrapped around his
knees. Then he nodded to himself and raised his head. "Jake," he said.
"Come to me."
Jake glanced at Benny, his new friend, then got up and walked across to
Roland. Oy walked at his heel, as always.
"Andy," Roland said.
"Sai?"
"Bring me four of the plates we ate from." As Andy did this,
Roland spoke to Overholser: "You're going to lose some crockery. When
gunslingers come to town, sai, things get broken. It's a simple fact of
life."
"Roland, I don't think we need-"
"Hush now," Roland said, and although his voice was gentle, Overholser
hushed at once. "You've told your tale; now we tell ours."
Andy's shadow fell over Roland. The gunslinger looked up and took the
plates, which hadn't been rinsed and still gleamed with grease. Then he
turned to Jake, where a remarkable change had taken place. Sitting with
Benny the Kid, watching Oy do his small clever tricks and grinning with
pride, Jake had looked like any other boy of twelve-carefree and full
of the old Dick, likely as not Now the smile had fallen away and it was
hard to tell just what his age might have been. His blue eyes looked
into Roland's, which were of almost the same shade. Beneath his
shoulder, the Ruger Jake had taken from his father's desk in another
life hung in its docker's clutch. The trigger was secured with a
rawhide loop which Jake now loosened without looking. It took only a
single tug.
"Say your lesson, Jake, son of Elmer, and be true."
Roland half-expected either Eddie or Susannah to interfere, but neither
did. He looked at them. Their faces were as cold and grave as Jake's.
Good.
Jake's voice was also without expression, but the words came out hard
and sure.
"I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the
face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand-"
"I don't see what this-" Overholser began.
"Shut up," Susannah said, and pointed a finger at him.
Jake seemed not to have heard. His eyes never left Roland's. The boy's
right hand lay on his upper chest, the fingers spread. "He who shoots
with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my
mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has
forgotten the face of his father."
Jake paused. Drew in breath. And let it out speaking.
"I kill with my heart."
"Kill these," Roland remarked, and with no more warning than that,
slung all four of the plates high into the air. They rose, spinning and
separating, black shapes against the white sky.
Jake's hand, the one resting on his chest, became a blur. It pulled the
Ruger from the docker's clutch, swung it up, and began pulling the
trigger while Roland's hand was still in the air. The plates did not
seem to explode one after the other but rather all at once. The pieces
rained down on the clearing. A few fell into the fire, puffing up ash
and sparks. One or two clanged off Andy's steel head.
Roland snatched upward, open hands moving in a blur. Although he had
given them no command, Eddie and Susannah did the same, did it even
while the visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis cringed, shocked by the
loudness of the gunfire. And the speed of the shots.
"Look here at us, do ya, and say thankee," Roland said. He held out his
hands. Eddie and Susannah did the same. Eddie had caught three pottery
shards. Susannah had five (and a shallow cut on the pad of one finger).
Roland had snatched a full dozen pieces of falling shrapnel. It looked
like almost enough to make a whole plate, were the pieces glued back
together.
The six from the Calla stared, unbelieving. Benny the Kid still had his
hands over his ears; now he lowered them slowly. He was looking at Jake
as one might look at a ghost or an apparition from the sky.
"My... God," Callahan said. "It's like a trick in some old Wild West
show."
"It's no trick," Roland said, "never think it. It's the Way of the Eld.
We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do
ya. And now I'll tell you what we will do." His eyes sought
Overholser's. "What we will do, I say, for no man bids us. Yet I think
nothing I say will discomfort you too badly. If mayhap it does-"
Roland shrugged. If it does, too bad, that shrug said.
He dropped the pottery shards between his boots and dusted his hands.
"If those had been Wolves," he said, "there would have been fifty-six
left to trouble you instead of sixty. Four of them lying dead on the
ground before you could draw a breath. Killed by a boy." He gazed at
Jake. "What you would call a boy, mayhap." Roland paused. "We're used
to long odds."
"The young fella's a breathtaking shot, I'd grant ye," said Slightman
the Elder. "But there's a difference between clay dishes and Wolves on
horseback."
"For you, sai, perhaps. Not for us. Not once the shooting starts. When
the shooting starts, we kill what moves. Isn't that why you sought us?"
"Suppose they can't be shot?" Overholser asked. "Can't be laid low by
even the hardest of hard calibers?"
"Why do you waste time when time is short?" Roland asked evenly. "You
know they can be killed or you never would have come out here to us in
the first place. I didn't ask, because the answer is self-evident."
Overholser had once more flushed dark red. "Cry your pardon," he said.
Benny, meanwhile, continued to stare at Jake with wide eyes, and Roland
felt a minor pang of regret for both boys. They might still manage some
sort of friendship, but what had just happened would change it in
fundamental ways, turn it into something quite unlike the usual
lighthearted khef boys shared. Which was a shame, because when Jake
wasn't being called upon to be a gunslinger, he was still only a child.
Close to the age Roland himself had been when the test of manhood had
been thrust on him. But he would not be young much longer, very likely.
And it was a shame.
"Listen to me now," Roland said, "and hear me very well. We leave you
shortly to go back to our own camp and take our own counsel. Tomorrow,
when we come to your town, we'll put up with one of you-"
"Come to Seven-Mile," Overholser said. "We'll have you and say thankee,
Roland."
"Our place is much smaller," Tian said, "but Zalia and I-"
"We'd be so pleased to have'ee," Zalia said. She had flushed as deeply
as Overholser. "Aye, we would."
Roland said, "Do you have a house as well as a church, sai Callahan?"
Callahan smiled. "I do, and tell God thankya."
"We might stay with you on our first night in Calla Bryn Sturgis,"
Roland said. "Could we do that?"
"Sure, and welcome."
"You could show us your church. Introduce us to its mysteries."
Callahan's gaze was steady. "I'd welcome the chance to do that."
"In the days after," Roland said, smiling, "we shall throw ourselves on
the hospitality of the town."
"You'll not find it wanting," Tian said. "That I promise ye."
Overholser and Slightman were nodding.
"If the meal we've just eaten is any sign, I'm sure that's true. We say
thankee, sai Jaffords; thankee one and all. For a week we four will go
about your town, poking our noses here and there. Mayhap a bit longer,
but likely a week. We'll look at the lay of the land and the way the
buildings are set on it. Look with an eye to the coming of these
Wolves. We'll talk to folk, and folk will talk to us-those of you
here now will see to that, aye?"
Callahan was nodding. "I can't speak for the Manni, but I'm sure the
rest will be more than willing to talk to you about the Wolves. God and
Man Jesus knows they're no secret. And those of the Crescent are
frightened to death of them. If they see a chance you might be able to
help us, they'll do all you ask."
"The Manni will speak to me as well," Roland said. "I've held palaver
with them before."
"Don't be carried away with the Old Fella's enthusiasm, Roland,"
Overholser said. He raised his plump hands in the air, a gesture of
caution. "There are others in town you'll have to convince-"
"Vaughn Eisenhart, for one," said Slightman.
"Aye, and Eben Took, do ya," Overholser said. "The General Store's the
only thing his name's on, ye ken, but he owns the boarding house and
the restaurant out front of it... as well's a half-interest in the
livery... and loan-paper on most of the smallholds hereabouts.
"When it comes to the smallholds, 'ee mustn't neglect Bucky Javier,"
Overholser rumbled. "He ain't the biggest of em, but only because he
gave away half of what he had to his young sister when she married."
Overholser leaned toward Roland, his face alight with a bit of town
history about to be passed on. "Roberta Javier, Bucky's sissa, she's
lucky," he said. "When the Wolves came last time, she and her twin
brother were but a year old. So they were passed over."
"Bucky's own twin brother was took the time before," Slight-man said.
"Bully's dead now almost four year. Of the sickness. Since then, there
ain't enough Bucky can do for those younger two. But you should talk to
him, aye. Bucky's not got but eighty acre, yet he's trig."
Roland thought, They still don't see.
"Thank you," he said. "What lies directly ahead for us comes down to
looking and listening, mostly. When it's done, we'll ask that whoever
is in charge of the feather take it around so that a meeting can be
called. At that meeting, we'll tell you if the town can be defended and
how many men we'll want to help us, if it can be done."
Roland saw Overholser puffing up to speak and shook his head at him.
"It won't be many we'd want, in any case," he said. "We're gunslingers,
not an army. We think differently, act differently, than armies do. We
might ask for as many as five to stand with us. Probably fewer-only
two or three. But we might need more to help us prepare."
"Why?" Benny asked.
Roland smiled. "That I can't say yet, son, because I haven't seen how
things are in your Calla. But in cases like this, surprise is always
the most potent weapon, and it usually takes many people to prepare a
good surprise."
"The greatest surprise to the Wolves," Tian said, "would be if we
fought at all."
"Suppose you decide the Calla can't be defended?" Over-holser asked.
"Tell me that, I beg."
"Then I and my friends will thank you for your hospitality and ride
on," Roland said, "for we have our own business farther along the Path
of the Beam." He observed Tian's and Zalia's crestfallen faces for a
moment, then said: "I don't think that's likely, you know. There's
usually a way."
"May the meeting receive your judgment favorably," Over-holser said.
Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth
home, should he want to. If these people still believed a tet of
gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a
public meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once
was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters would play out and become
part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history
and his quest in Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps
not even that; perhaps he'd finish in a dead heap somewhere east of
town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked
over by the crows and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did.
Meanwhile, they were looking at him.
Roland stood up, wincing at a hard flare of pain in his right hip as he
did so. Taking their cues from him, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake also got
to their feet.
"We're well-met," Roland said. "As for what lies ahead, there will be
water if God wills it."
Callahan said, "Amen."
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 24 Feb 2005 11:07:13 -0800
--------
Chapter VII: Todash
ONE
"Gray horses," Eddie said.
"Aye," Roland agreed.
"Fifty or sixty of them, all on gray horses."
"Aye, so they did say."
"And didn't think it the least bit strange," Eddie mused.
"No. They didn't seem to."
"Is it?"
"Fifty or sixty horses, all the same color? I'd say so, yes."
"These Calla-folk raise horses themselves."
"Aye."
"Brought some for us to ride." Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in
his life, was grateful that at least had been put off, but didn't say
so.
"Aye, tethered over the hill."
"You know that for a fact?"
"Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them."
"Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade,
as a matter of course?"
"Because they don't really think about the Wolves or anything to do
with them," Roland said. "They're too busy being afraid, I think."
Eddie whistled five notes that didn't quite make a melody. Then he
said, "Gray horses."
Roland nodded. "Gray horses."
They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it
when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those
giant blackbirds he called rusties... but he loved it. Maybe it was
just that Roland laughed so seldom.
It was late afternoon. Overhead, the clouds had thinned enough to turn
a pallid blue that was almost the color of sky. The Overholser party
had returned to their camp. Susannah and Jake had gone back along the
forest road to pick more muffin-balls. After the big meal they'd packed
away, none of them wanted anything heavier. Eddie sat on a log,
whittling. Beside him sat Roland, with all their guns broken down and
spread out before him on a piece of deerskin. He oiled the pieces one
by one, holding each bolt and cylinder and barrel up to the daylight
for a final look before setting it aside for reassembly.
"You told them it was out of their hands," Eddie said, "but they didn't
ken that any more than they did the business about all those gray
horses. And you didn't press it."
"Only would have distressed them," Roland said. "There was a saying in
Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall."
"Uh-huh," Eddie said. "There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can't get
snot off a suede jacket." He held up the object he was making. It would
be a top, Roland thought, a toy for a baby. And again he wondered how
much Eddie might know about the woman he lay down with each night. The
women. Not on the top of his mind, but underneath. "If you decide we
can help them, then we have to help them. That's what Eld's Way really
boils down to, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Roland said.
"And if we can't get any of them to stand with us, we stand alone."
"Oh, I'm not worried about that," Roland said. He had a saucer filled
with light, sweet gun-oil. Now he dipped the corner of a chamois rag
into it, picked up the spring-clip of Jake's Ruger, and began to clean
it. "Tian Jaffords would stand with us, come to that. Surely he has a
friend or two who'd do the same regardless of what their meeting
decides. In a pinch, there's his wife."
"And if we get them both killed, what about their kids? They have five.
Also, I think there's an old guy in the picture. One of em's Grampy.
They probably take care of him, too."
Roland shrugged. A few months ago, Eddie would have mistaken that
gesture-and the gunslinger's expressionless face- for indifference.
Now he knew better. Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and
traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.
"What if we get killed in this little town, screwing around with these
Wolves?" Eddie asked. "Isn't your last thought gonna be something like,
'I can't believe what a putz I was, throwing away my chance to get to
the Dark Tower in order to take up for a bunch of snotnose brats.' Or
similar sentiments."
"Unless we stand true, we'll never get within a thousand miles of the
Tower," Roland said. "Would you tell me you don't feel that?"
Eddie couldn't, because he did. He felt something else, as well: a
species of bloodthirsty eagerness. He actually wanted to fight again.
Wanted to have a few of these Wolves, whatever they were, in the sights
of one of Roland's big revolvers. There was no sense kidding himself
about the truth: he wanted to take a few scalps.
Or wolf-masks.
"What's really troubling you, Eddie? I'd have you speak while it's just
you and me." The gunslinger's mouth quirked in a thin, slanted smile.
"Do ya, I beg."
"Shows, huh?"
Roland shrugged and waited.
Eddie considered the question. It was a big question. Facing it made
him feel desperate and inadequate, pretty much the way he'd felt when
faced with the task of carving the key that would letjake Chambers
through into their world. Only then he'd had the ghost of his big
brother to blame, Henry whispering deep down in his head that he was no
good, never had been, never would be. Now it was just the enormity of
what Roland was asking. Because everything was troubling him,
everything was wrong. Everything. Or maybe wrong was the wrong word,
and by a hundred and eighty degrees. Because in another way things
seemed too right, too perfect, too...
"Arrrggghh," Eddie said. He grabbed bunches of hair on both sides of
his head and pulled. "I can't think of a way to say it."
"Then say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't hesitate."
"Nineteen," Eddie said. "This whole deal has gone nineteen."
He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and
kicked his feet like a kid doing a tantrum. He thought: Maybe killing a
few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that's all it will take.
TWO
Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, "Do you feel
better?"
Eddie sat up. "Actually I do."
Roland nodded, smiling a little. "Then can you say more? If you can't,
we'll let it go, but I've come to respect your feelings, Eddie-far
more than you realize-and if you'd speak, I'd hear."
What he said was true. The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had
wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his
weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in
Balazar's office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had
known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how
much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a
kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal.
Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and
sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of
Alain Johns's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like
neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and
self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and
courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called "heart."
But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.
"All right, then," Eddie said. "Don't stop me. Don't ask questions.
Just listen."
Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn't come back, at least
not just yet.
"I look in the sky-up there where the clouds are breaking right this
minute-and I see the number nineteen written in blue."
Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also
saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck
that looked like a gunnywagon.
"I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen.
Names make nineteen, like Overholser's and Callahan's. But that's just
what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of." Eddie was
speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland's eyes.
"Here's another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys
sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that's
right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned."
Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put
anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long
life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at
another time, but not now.
"Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because... ah,
man, this is hard... Roland, everything here is real, but it's not."
Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn't his world, not
anymore-for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the
beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond- but again kept his
mouth closed.
Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and
leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor.
"Real," he said. "I can feel it and smell it." He put the handful of
needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. "I can taste
it. And at the same time, it's as unreal as a nineteen you might see in
the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you
understand what I'm saying?"
"I understand it very well," Roland murmured.
"The people are real. You... Susannah...Jake... that guy Gasher who
snatched Jake... Overholser and the Slightmans.
"But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not
real. It's not sensible or logical, either, but that's not what I mean.
It's just not real Why do people over here sing 'Hey Jude'? I don't
know. That cyborg bear, Shardik-where do I know that name from? Why
did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz,
Roland-all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the
same time it doesn't seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like
nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into
the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There's a road for us to walk
on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is
coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what?
It's not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!"
Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he
brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest
earth on his brow.
"The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon
a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel you
know. Maybe you don't like em all-Overholser's a little hard to
swallow-but you feel you know em."
Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn't even seen
Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some
ways that seemed perfectly reasonable- farming and ranching towns the
world over bore similarities to each other-but in other ways it was
disturbing. Disturbing as hell. The sombrero Slightman had been
wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles
from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be.
But was it likely that Slightman's sombrero should remind Roland so
strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis,
all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?
As for that, Eddie says I have none, he thought.
"The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem," Eddie was continuing.
"And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to
save them from the fairy tale villains. I know it's real-people are
going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will
be real, the crying afterward will be real-but at the same time
there's something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery."
"And New York?" Roland asked. "How did that feel to you?"
"The same," Eddie said. "I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on
the table after Jake took Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book...
and then, out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up! That
fuck!"
Here, here, now!" Susannah called merrily from behind them. "No
profanity, boys." Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was
full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland
supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with
it.
Roland said, "Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn't
it?"
"It's not exactly unreality, Roland. It-"
"Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away.
Doesn't it?"
"Yes," Eddie said. "When I'm with her."
He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.
THREE
The light was fading out of the day. They sat around the fire and let
it go. What little appetite they'd been able to muster had been easily
satisfied by the muffin-balls Susannah and Jake had brought back to
camp. Roland had been meditating on something Slightman had said, and
more deeply than was probably healthy. Now he pushed it aside still
half-chewed and said, "Some of us or all of us may meet later tonight
in the city of New York."
"I only hope I get to go this time," Susannah said.
"That's as ka will," Roland said evenly. "The important thing is that
you stay together. If there's only one who makes the journey, I think
it's apt to be you who goes, Eddie. If only one makes the journey, that
one should stay exactly where he... or mayhap she... is until the bells
start again."
"The kammen," Eddie said. "That's what Andy called em."
"Do you all understand that?"
They nodded, and looking into their faces, Roland realized that each
one of them was reserving the right to decide what to do when the time
came, based upon the circumstances. Which was exactly right. They were
either gunslingers or they weren't, after all.
He surprised himself by uttering a brief snort of a laugh.
"What's so funny?" Jake asked.
"I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions," Roland
said.
"If you mean us," Eddie said, "lemme tell you something,
Roland-you're not exacdy Norman Normal yourself."
"I suppose not," Roland said. "If it's a group that crosses- two, a
trio, perhaps all of us-we should join hands when the chimes start."
"Andy said we had to concentrate on each other," Eddie said. "To keep
from getting lost."
Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it
sounded more like a galley-chorus-a thing made to be shouted out
verse by verse-than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to
carry, her voice was melodious enough: "Children, when ye hear the
music of the clarinet. . . Children, when ye hear the music of the
flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine... Ye must
bow down and worship the iyyy-DOL!"
"What is it?"
"A field-chant," she said. "The sort of thing my grandparents and
great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa's
cotton. But times change." She smiled. "I first heard it in a Greenwich
Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white
blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk."
"I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too," Jake breathed. "Hell, I bet he
was sitting at the next damn table."
Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. "Why do you say so,
sugar?"
Eddie said, "Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau
had been hanging around the Village since... what'd he say, Jake?"
"Not the Village, Bleecker Street," Jake said, laughing a little. "Mr.
Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before
Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be
a harmonica."
"It is," Eddie said, "and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake's
saying, I'd go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there.
It wouldn't even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending
the bar. Because that's just how things work in the Land of Nineteen."
"In any case," Roland said, "those of us who cross should stay
together. And I mean within a hand's reach, all the time."
"I don't think I'll be there," Jake said.
"Why do you say so, Jake?" the gunslinger asked, surprised.
"Because I'll never fall asleep," Jake said. "I'm too excited."
But eventually they all slept.
FOUR
He knows it's a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman's
chance remark, and yet he can't escape it. Always look for the back
door, Cort used to tell them, but if there's a back door in this dream,
Roland cannot find it. I heard of Jericho Hill and such
blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart's foreman
had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would
it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a
whole world.
The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then
seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is
a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded
statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom's men advance
relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw
ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending,
the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint
that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes.
Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom's eagle-eyed
son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot
in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends,
a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet's column
was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after
midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert... the sound of their
guns... and oh, when Alain cried out their names-
And now they're at the top and there's nowhere left to run. Behind them
to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt-what five hundred
miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of
the stone faces, and Grissom's screaming, advancing men. Roland and his
own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left,
and that's a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling
faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts-
against a dozen. That's all that's left of them now, here at the top of
Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the
guns of his best friends-stolid, dependable Alain, who could have
ridden on to safety but chose not to-and Cuthbert has been shot. How
many times'? Five"? Six? His shirt is soaked crimson to his skin. One
side of his face has been drowned in blood; the eye on that side bulges
sightlessly on his cheek. Yet he still has Roland's horn, the one which
was blown by Arthur Eld, or so the stories did say. He will not give it
back. "For I blow it sweeter than you ever did, " he tells Roland,
laughing. "You can have it again when I'm dead. Neglect not to pluck it
up, Roland, for it's your property."
Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a
rook's skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. "The lookout, " he
had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such
was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his
foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward
him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld's Horn in the other,
blood-bolted and half-blinded and dying... but still laughing. Ah dear
gods, laughing and laughing.
"Roland!"he cries. "We've been betrayed! We're outnumbered! Our backs
are to the sea! We've got em right where we want em! Shall we charge?"
And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower
is really to end here on Jericho Hill-betrayed by one of their own
and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson's
army-then let it end splendidly.
"Aye!" he shouts. "Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me!
Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!"
"As for gunslingers, Roland," Cuthbert says, "I am here. And we are the
last."
Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He
can feel Cuthbert's burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness.
And yet he's laughing. Bert is still laughing.
"All right," Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining
men. "We're going into them. And will accept no quarter. "
"Nope, no quarter, absolutely none, " Cuthbert says.
"We will not accept their surrender if offered. "
"Under no circumstances!" Cuthbert agrees, laughing harder than ever.
"Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms."
"Then blow that fucking horn."
Cuthbert raises the horn to his bloody lips and blows a great blast-
the final blast, for when it drops from his fingers a minute later (or
perhaps it's five, or ten; time has no meaning in that final battle),
Roland will let it lie in the dust. In his grief and bloodlust he will
forget all about Eld's Horn.
"And now, my friends-hile!"
"Hile!" the last dozen cry beneath that blazing sun. It is the end of
them, the end of Gilead, the end of everything, and he no longer cares.
The old red fury, dry and maddening, is settling over his mind,
drowning all thought. One last time, then, he thinks. Let it be so.
"To me!" cries Roland of Gilead. "Forward! For the Tower! "
"The Tower!" Cuthbert cries out beside him, reeling. He holds Eld's
Horn up to the sky in one hand, his revolver in the other.
"No prisoners!" Roland screams. "NO PRISONERS!"
They rush forward and down toward Grissom's blue-faced horde, he and
Cuthbert in the lead, and as they pass the first of the great
gray-blackfaces leaning in the high grass, spears and bolts and bullets
flying all around them, the chimes begin. It is a melody far beyond
beautiful; it threatens to tear him to pieces with its stark
loveliness.
Not now, he thinks, ah, gods, not now-let me finish it Let me finish
it with my friend at my side and have peace at last. Please.
He reaches for Cuthbert's hand. For one moment he feels the touch of
his friend's blood-sticky fingers, there on Jericho Hill where his
brave and laughing existence was snuffed out... and then the fingers
touching his are gone. Or rather, his have melted clean through Bert's.
He is falling, he is falling, the world is darkening, he is falling,
the chimes are playing, the kammen are playing ("Sounds Hawaiian,
doesn't it?") and he is falling, Jericho Hill is gone, Eld's Horn is
gone, there's darkness and red letters in the darkness, some are Great
Letters, enough so he can read what they say, the words say-
FIVE
They said don't walk. Although, Roland saw, people were crossing the
street in spite of the sign. They would take a quick look in the
direction of the flowing traffic, and then go for it. One fellow
crossed in spite of an oncoming yellow tack-see. The tack-see swerved
and blared its horn. The walking man yelled fearlessly at it, then shot
up the middle finger of his right hand and shook it after the departing
vehicle. Roland had an idea that this gesture probably did not mean
long days and pleasant nights.
It was night in New York City, and although there were people moving
everywhere, none were of his ka-tet. Here, Roland admitted to himself,
was one contingency he had hardly expected: that the one person to show
up would be him. Not Eddie, but him. Where in the name of all the gods
was he supposed to go? And what was he supposed to do when he got
there?
Remember your own advice, he thought. "If you show up alone," you told
them, "stay where you are. "
But did that mean to just roost on... he looked up at the green
street-sign... on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street,
doing nothing but watching a sign change from don't walk in red to walk
in white?
While he was pondering this, a voice called out from behind him, high
and delirious with joy. "Roland! Sugarbunch! Turn around and see me!
See me very well!"
Roland turned, already knowing what he would see, but smiling all the
same. How terrible to relive that day at Jericho Hill, but what an
antidote was this-Susannah Dean, flying down Fifty-fourth Street
toward him, laughing and weeping with joy, her arms held out.
"My legs!" She was screaming it at the top of her voice. "My legs! I
have my legs back! Oh Roland, honeydoll, praise the Man Jesus, I HAVE
MY LEGS BACK!"
SIX
She threw herself into his embrace, kissing his cheek, his neck, his
brow, his nose, his lips, saying it over and over again: "My legs, oh
Roland do you see, I can walk, I can run, I have my legs, praise God
and all the saints, I have my legs back."
"Give you every joy of them, dear heart," Roland said. Falling into the
patois of the place in which he had lately found himself was an old
trick of his-or perhaps it was habit. For now it was the patois of
the Calla. He supposed if he spent much time here in New York, he'd
soon find himself waving his middle finger at tack-sees.
But I'd always be an outsider, he thought. Why, I can't even say
aspirin. Every time I try, the word comes out wrong.
She took his right hand, dragged it down with surprising force, and
placed it on her shin. "Do you feel it?" she demanded. "I mean, I'm not
just imagining it, am I?"
Roland laughed. "Did you not run to me as if with wings on em like Raf?
Yes, Susannah." He put his left hand, the one with all the fingers, on
her left leg. "One leg and two legs, each with a foot below them." He
frowned. "We ought to get you some shoes, though."
"Why? This is a dream. It has to be."
He looked at her steadily, and slowly her smile faded.
"Not? Really not?"
"We've gone todash. We are really here. If you cut your foot, Mia,
you'll have a cut foot tomorrow, when you wake up aside the campfire."
The other name had come out almost-but not quite-on its own. Now he
waited, all his muscles wire-tight, to see if she would notice. If she
did, he'd apologize and tell her he'd gone todash directly from a dream
of someone he'd known long ago (although there had only been one woman
of any importance after Susan Delgado, and her name had not been Mia).
But she didn't notice, and Roland wasn't much surprised.
Because she was getting ready to go on another of her hunting
expeditions-as Mia-when the kammen rang. And unlike Susannah, Mia
has legs. She banquets on rich foods in a great hall, she talks with
all her friends, she didn't go to Morehouse or to no house, and she has
legs. So this one has legs. This one is both women, although she
doesn't know it.
Suddenly Roland found himself hoping that they wouldn't meet Eddie. He
might sense the difference even if Susannah herself didn't. And that
could be bad. If Roland had had three wishes, like the foundling prince
in a child's bedtime story, right now all three would have been for the
same thing: to get through this business in Calla Bryn Sturgis before
Susannah's pregnancy-Mia's pregnancy-became obvious. Having to deal
with both things at the same time would be hard.
Perhaps impossible.
She was looking at him with wide, questioning eyes. Not because he'd
called her by a name that wasn't hers, but because she wanted to know
what they should do next.
"It's your city," he said. "I would see the bookstore. And the vacant
lot." He paused. "And the rose. Can you take me?"
"Well," she said, looking around, "it's my city, no doubt about that,
but Second Avenue sure doesn't look like it did back in the days when
Detta got her kicks shoplifting in Macy's."
"So you can't find the bookstore and the vacant lot?" Roland was
disappointed but far from desolate. There would be a way. There was
always a-
"Oh, no problem there," she said. "The streets are the same. New York's
just a grid, Roland, with the avenues running one way and the streets
the other. Easy as pie. Come on."
The sign had gone back to don't walk, but after a quick glance uptown,
Susannah took his arm and they crossed Fifty-fourth to the other side.
Susannah strode fearlessly in spite of her bare feet. The blocks were
short but crowded with exotic shops. Roland couldn't help goggling, but
his lack of attention seemed safe enough; although the sidewalks were
crowded, no one crashed into them. Roland could hear his bootheels
clopping on the sidewalk, however, and could see the shadows they were
casting in the light of the display windows.
Almost here, he thought. Were the force that brought us any more
powerful, we would be here.
And, he realized, the force might indeed grow stronger, assuming that
Callahan was right about what was hidden under the floor of his church.
As they drew closer to the town and to the source of the thing doing
this...
Susannah twitched his arm. Roland stopped immediately. "Is it your
feet?" he asked.
"No," she said, and Roland saw she was frightened. "Why is it so dark?"
"Susannah, it's night."
She gave his arm an impatient shake. "I know that, I'm not blind. Can't
you..." She hesitated. "Can't you feel it?"
Roland realized he could. For one thing, the darkness on Second Avenue
really wasn't dark at all. The gunslinger still couldn't comprehend the
prodigal way in which these people of New York squandered the things
those of Gilead had held most rare and precious. Paper; water; refined
oil; artificial light. This last was everywhere. There was the glow
from the store windows (although most were closed, the displays were
still lit), the even harsher glow from a popkin-selling place called
Blimpie's, and over all this, peculiar orange electric lamps that
seemed to drench the very air with light. Yet Susannah was right. There
was a black feel to the air in spite of the orange lamps. It seemed to
surround the people who walked this street. It made him think about
what Eddie had said earlier: This whole deal has gone nineteen.
But this darkness, more felt than seen, had nothing to do with
nineteen. You had to subtract six in order to understand what was going
on here. And for the first time, Roland really believed Callahan was
right.
"Black Thirteen," he said.
"What?"
"It's brought us here, sent us todash, and we feel it all around us.
It's not the same as when I flew inside the grapefruit, but it's like
that."
"It feels bad," she said, speaking low.
"It is bad," he said. "Black Thirteen's very likely the most terrible
object from the days of Eld still remaining on the face of the earth.
Not that the Wizard's Rainbow was from then; I'm sure it existed even
before-"
"Roland! Hey, Roland! Suze!"
They looked up and in spite of his earlier misgivings, Roland was
immensely relieved to see not only Eddie, but Jake and Oy, as well.
They were about a block and a half farther along. Eddie was waving.
Susannah waved back exuberantly. Roland grabbed her arm before she
started to run, which was clearly her intention.
"Mind your feet," he said. "You don't need to pick up some sort of
infection and carry it back to the other side."
They compromised at a rapid walk. Eddie and Jake, both shod, ran to
meet them. Pedestrians moved out of their way without looking, or even
breaking their conversations, Roland saw, and then observed that wasn't
quite true. There was a little boy, surely no older than three, walking
sturdily along next to his mother. The woman seemed to notice nothing,
but as Eddie and Jake swung around them, the toddler watched with wide,
wondering eyes... and then actually stretched out a hand, as if to
stroke the briskly trotting Oy.
Eddie pulled ahead of Jake and arrived first. He held Susannah out at
arm's length, looking at her. His expression, Roland saw, was really
quite similar to that of the tot.
"Well? What do you think, sugar?" Susannah spoke nervously, like a
woman who has come home to her husband with some radical new hairdo.
"A definite improvement," Eddie said. "I don't need em to love you, but
they're way beyond good and into the land of excellent. Christ, now
you're an inch taller than I am!"
Susannah saw this was true and laughed. Oy sniffed at the ankle that
hadn't been there the last time he'd seen this woman, and then he
laughed, too. It was an odd barky-bark of a sound, but quite clearly a
laugh for all that.
"Like your legs, Suze," Jake said, and the perfunctory quality of this
compliment made Susannah laugh again. The boy didn't notice; he had
already turned to Roland. "Do you want to see the bookstore?"
"Is there anything to see?"
Jake's face clouded. "Actually, not much. It's closed."
"I would see the vacant lot, if there's time before we're sent back,"
Roland said. "And the rose."
"Do they hurt?" Eddie asked Susannah. He was looking at her closely
indeed.
"They feel fine," she said, laughing. "Fine. "
"You look different."
"I bet!" she said, and executed a littie barefoot jig. It had been
moons and moons since she had last danced, but the exultancy she so
clearly felt made up for any lack of grace. A woman wearing a business
suit and swinging a briefcase bore down on the ragged littie party of
wanderers, then abruptly veered off, actually taking a few steps into
the street to get around them. "You bet I do, I got legs!"
"Just like the song says," Eddie told her.
"Huh?"
"Never mind," he said, and slipped an arm around her waist. But again
Roland saw him give her that searching, questioning look. But with luck
he'll leave it alone, Roland thought.
And that was what Eddie did. He kissed the corner of her mouth, then
turned to Roland. "So you want to see the famous vacant lot and the
even more famous rose, huh? Well, so do I. Lead on, Jake."
SEVEN
Jake led them down Second Avenue, pausing only long enough so they
could all take a quick peek into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.
No one was wasting light in this shop, however, and there really wasn't
much to see. Roland was hoping for a look at the menu sign, but it was
gone.
Reading his mind in the matter-of-fact way of people who share khef,
Jake said, "He probably changes it every day."
"Maybe," Roland said. He looked in through the window a moment longer,
saw nothing but darkened shelves, a few tables, and the counter Jake
had mentioned-the one where the old fellows sat drinking coffee and
playing this world's version of Casdes. Nothing to see, but something
to feel, even through the glass: despair and loss. If it had been a
smell, Roland thought, it would have been sour and a bit stale. The
smell of failure. Maybe of good dreams that never grew. Which made it
the perfect lever for someone like Enrico "Il Roche "Balazar.
"Seen enough?" Eddie asked.
"Yes. Let's go."
EIGHT
For Roland, the eight-block journey from Second and Fifty-fourth to
Second and Forty-sixth was like visiting a country in which he had
until that moment only half-believed. How much stranger must it be for
Jake? he wondered. The bum who'd asked the boy for a quarter was gone,
but the restaurant he'd been sitting near was there: Chew Chew Mama's.
This was on the corner of Second and Fifty-second. A block farther down
was the record store, Tower of Power. It was still open-according to
an overhead clock that told the time in large electric dots, it was
only fourteen minutes after eight in the evening. Loud sounds were
pouring out of the open door. Guitars and drums. This world's music. It
reminded him of the sacrificial music played by the Grays, back in the
city of Lud, and why not? This was Lud, in some twisted,
otherwhere-and-when way. He was sure of it.
"It's the Rolling Stones," Jake said, "but not the one that was playing
on the day I saw the rose. That one was 'Paint It Black.' "
"Don't you recognize this one?" Eddie asked.
"Yeah, but I can't remember the title."
"Oh, but you should," Eddie said. "It's 'Nineteenth Nervous
Breakdown.'"
Susannah stopped, looked around. "Jake?"
Jake nodded. "He's right."
Eddie, meanwhile, had fished a piece of newspaper from the
security-gated doorway next to Tower of Power Records. A section of The
New York Times, in fact.
"Hon, didn't your ma ever teach you that gutter-trolling is generally
not practiced by the better class of people?" Susannah asked.
Eddie ignored her. "Look at this," he said. "All of you."
Roland bent close, half-expecting to see news of another great plague,
but there was nothing so shattering. At least not as far as he could
tell.
"Read me what it says," he asked Jake. "The letters swim in and out of
my mind. I think it's because we're todash-caught in between-"
"RHODESIAN FORCES TIGHTEN HOLD ON MOZAMBIQUE VILLAGES," Jake read, "
TWO CARTER AIDES PREDICT A SAVING OF BILLIONS IN WELFARE PLAN. And down
here, CHINESE DISCLOSE THAT 1976 QUAKE WAS DEADLIEST IN FOUR CENTURIES.
Also-"
"Who's Carter?" Susannah asked. "Is he the President before... Ronald
Reagan?" She garnished the last two words with a large wink. Eddie had
so far been unable to convince her that he was serious about Reagan's
being President. Nor would she believe Jake when the boy told her he
knew it sounded crazy, but the idea was at least faintly plausible
because Reagan had been governor of California. Susannah had simply
laughed at this and nodded, as if giving him high marks for creativity.
She knew Eddie had talked Jake into backing up his fish story, but she
would not be hooked. She supposed she could see Paul Newman as
President, maybe even Henry Fonda, who had looked presidential enough
in Fail-Safe, but the host of Death Valley Days? Not on your bottom.
"Never mind Carter," Eddie said. "Look at the date."
Roland tried, but it kept swimming in and out. It would almost settle
into Great Letters that he could read, and then fall back into
gibberish. "What is it, for your father's sake?"
"June second," Jake said. He looked at Eddie. "But if time's the same
here and over on the other side, shouldn't it be June first?"
"But it's not the same," Eddie said grimly. "It's not. Time goes by
faster on this side. Game on. And the game-clock's running fast."
Roland considered. "If we come here again, it's going to be later each
time, isn't it?"
Eddie nodded.
Roland went on, talking to himself as much as to the others. "Every
minute we spend on the other side-the Calla side-a minute and a
half goes by over here. Or maybe two."
"No, not two," Eddie said. "I'm sure it's not going double-time." But
his uneasy glance back down at the date on the newspaper suggested he
wasn't sure at all.
"Even if you're right," Roland said, "all we can do now is go forward."
"Toward the fifteenth of July," Susannah said. "When Balazar and his
gentlemen stop playing nice."
"Maybe we ought to just let these Calla-folk do their own thing," Eddie
said. "I hate to say that, Roland, but maybe we should."
"We can't do that, Eddie."
"Why not?"
"Because Callahan's got Black Thirteen," Susannah said. "Our help is
his price for turning it over. And we need it."
Roland shook his head. "He'll turn it over in any case-I thought I
was clear about that. He's terrified of it."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "I got that feeling, too."
"We have to help them because it's the Way of Eld," Roland told
Susannah. "And because the way of ka is always the way of duty."
He thought he saw a glitter far down in her eyes, as though he'd said
something funny. He supposed he had, but Susannah wasn't the one he had
amused. It had been either Detta or Mia who found those ideas funny.
The question was which one. Or had it been both?
"I hate how it feels here," Susannah said. "That dark feeling."
"It'll be better at the vacant lot," Jake said. He started walking, and
the others followed. "The rose makes everything better. You'll see."
NINE
When Jake crossed Fiftieth, he began to hurry. On the downtown side
of Forty-ninth, he began to jog. At the corner of Second and
Forty-eighth, he began to run. He couldn't help it. He got a little
walk help at Forty-eighth, but the sign on the post began to flash red
as soon as he reached the far curb.
"Jake, wait up!" Eddie called from behind him, but Jake didn't. Perhaps
couldn't. Certainly Eddie felt the pull of the thing; so did Roland and
Susannah. There was a hum rising in the air, faint and sweet. It was
everything the ugly black feeling around them was not.
To Roland the hum brought back memories of Mejis and Susan Delgado. Of
kisses shared in a mattress of sweet grass.
Susannah remembered being with her father when she was little, crawling
up into his lap and laying the smooth skin of her cheek against the
rough weave of his sweater. She remembered how she would close her eyes
and breathe deeply of the smell that was his smell and his alone: pipe
tobacco and winter-green and the Musterole he rubbed into his wrists,
where the arthritis first began to bite him at the outrageous age of
twenty-five. What these smells meant to her was that everything was all
right.
Eddie found himself remembering a trip to Atlantic City when he'd been
very young, no more than five or six. Their mother had taken them, and
at one point in the day she and Henry had gone off to get ice cream
cones. Mrs. Dean had pointed at the boardwalk and had said, You put
your fanny right there, Mister Man, and keep it there until we get
back. And he did. He could have sat there all day, looking down the
slope of the beach at the gray pull and flow of the ocean. The gulls
rode just above the foam, calling to each other. Each time the waves
drew back, they left a slick expanse of wet brown sand so bright he
could hardly look at it without squinting. The sound of the waves was
both large and lulling. I could stay here forever, he remembered
thinking. I could stay here forever because it's beautiful and peaceful
and... and all right. Everything here is all right.
That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it,
too): the sense of something mat was wonderfully and beautifully all
right.
Roland and Eddie grasped Susannah by the elbows without so much as an
exchanged glance. They lifted her bare feet off the sidewalk and
carried her. At Second and Forty-seventh the traffic was against them,
but Roland threw up a hand at the oncoming headlights and cried, "Hile!
Stop in the name of Gilead!"
And they did. There was a scream of brakes, a crump of a front fender
meeting a rear one, and the tinkle of falling glass, but they stopped.
Roland and Eddie crossed in a spotlight glare of headlights and a
cacophony of horns, Susannah between them with her restored (and
already very dirty) feet three inches off the ground. Their sense of
happiness and tightness grew stronger as they approached the corner of
Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Roland felt the hum of the rose
racing deliriously in his blood.
Yes, Roland thought. By all the gods, yes. This is it. Perhaps not just
a doorway to the Dark Tower, but the Tower itself. Gods, the strength
of it! the pull of it! Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie-if only you were here!
Jake stood on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, looking at a board
fence about five feet high. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. From
the darkness beyond the fence came a strong harmonic humming. The sound
of many voices, all singing together. Singing one vast open note. Here
is yes, the voices said. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the
fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your
blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye.
Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here
is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is
all right.
Jake turned to them. "Do you feel it?" he asked. "Do you?"
Roland nodded. So did Eddie.
"Suze?" the boy asked.
"It's almost the loveliest thing in the world, isn't it?" she said.
Almost, Roland thought. She said almost. Nor did he miss the fact that
her hand went to her belly and stroked as she said it.
TEN
The posters Jake remembered were there-Olivia Newton-John at Radio
City Music Hall, G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a place called the
Mercury Lounge, a horror movie called War of the Zombies, no
trespassing. But-
"That's not the same," he said, pointing at a graffito in dusky pink.
"It's the same color, and the printing looks like the same person did
it, but when I was here before, it was a poem about the Turtle. 'See
the TURTLE of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth.' And
then something about following the Beam."
Eddie stepped closer and read this: "Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of
mine, Done parked her RIG in the DIXIE PIG, in the year of '99." He
looked at Susannah. "What in the hell does that mean? Any idea, Suze?"
She shook her head. Her eyes were very large. Frightened eyes, Roland
thought. But which woman was frightened? He couldn't tell. He only knew
that Odetta Susannah Holmes had been divided from the beginning, and
that "mio" was very close to Mia. The hum coming from the darkness
behind the fence made it hard to think of these things. He wanted to go
to the source of the hum right now. Needed to, as a man dying of thirst
needs to go to water.
"Come on," Jake said. "We can climb right over. It's easy."
Susannah looked down at her bare, dirty feet, and took a step backward.
"Not me," she said. "I can't. Not without shoes."
Which made perfect sense, but Roland thought there was more to it than
that. Mia didn't want to go in there. Mia understood something dreadful
might happen if she did. To her, and to her baby. For a moment he was
on the verge of forcing the issue, of letting the rose take care of
both the thing growing inside her and her troublesome new personality,
one so strong that Susannah had shown up here with Mia's legs.
No, Roland. That was Alain's voice. Alain, who had always been
strongest in the touch. Wrong time, wrong place.
"I'll stay with her," Jake said. He spoke with enormous regret but no
hesitation, and Roland was swept by his love for the boy he had once
allowed to die. That vast voice from the darkness beyond the fence sang
of that love; he heard it. And of simple forgiveness rather than the
difficult forced march of atonement? He thought it was.
"No," she said. "You go on, honeybunch. I'll be fine." She smiled at
them. "This is my city too, you know. I can look out for myself. And
besides-" She lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. "I
think we're kind of invisible."
Eddie was once again looking at her in that searching way, as if to ask
her how she could not go with them, bare feet or no bare feet, but this
time Roland wasn't worried. Mia's secret was safe, at least for the
time being; the call of the rose was too strong for Eddie to be able to
think of much else. He was wild to get going.
"We should stay together," Eddie said reluctantly. "So we don't get
lost going back. You said so yourself, Roland."
"How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?" Roland asked. It was hard
to talk with that hum singing in his ears like a wind. Hard to think.
"It's pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but
probably less."
"The second we hear the chimes," Roland said, "we run for the fence and
Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Eddie said.
"All three of us and Oy,"Jake said.
"No, Oy stays with Susannah."
Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn't expected him to.
"Jake, Oy also has bare feet... and didn't you say there was broken
glass in there?"
"Ye-eahh..." Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and
looked into Oy's gold-ringed eyes. "Stay with Susannah, Oy."
"Oy! Ay!" Oy stay. It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to
Roland, and nodded.
"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Are you sure?"
"Yes." Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia
in control, pulling the levers and turning the dials. Almost. Even now
he wasn't positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be
positive of anything except that everything-everything-could be all
right.
Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board
fence with its odd poem: Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He
laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and gone
like a breath of breeze.
"Ake!" Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah's
bare feet.
"You next, Eddie," Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers
together, meaning to give Eddie the same step Eddie had given Jake, but
Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie
Roland had first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could
never have done that.
Roland said, "Stay where you are. Both of you." He could have meant the
woman and the billy-bumbler, but it was only the woman he looked at.
"We'll be fine," she said, and bent to stroke Oy's silky fur. "Won't
we, big guy?"
"Oy!"
"Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can."
Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the
fence. A moment later he was gone, leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the
most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.
ELEVEN
Strange things happened to her as she waited.
Back the way they'd come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock
alternately flashed the time and temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27,
64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took
her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with
the sign's machinery?
Must've, she thought. What else could it be? Nothing, she supposed, but
why did everything suddenly feel different? Even look different? Maybe
it was my machinery that went wrong.
Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she
realized why things looked different. Besides somehow slipping seven
uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former,
all-too-familiar perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy
because she was closer to the ground. The splendid lower legs and feet
she'd been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.
How had it happened1? And when? In the missing seven minutes'?
Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past
her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Halfa dozen people
were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was
a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes
were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to
her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the
lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the
other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends
theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal
promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear.
Only this woman wasn't todash.
This woman was dead.
TWELVE
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash-
and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw
faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and
Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas's gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw
his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a
little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the
crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him 'Bama,
although that was a secret, just between them.
Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with
the clubfoot, and Tommy Fredericks, who always got so excited watching
the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids called him
Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a
fight with Al Capone himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment
to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the Mad Fuckin
Hungarian. He saw his mother's face in a pile of broken bricks, her
glimmering eyes recreated from the broken pieces of a soft-drink
bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block
called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin
watermelons). And of course he saw Henry. Henry standing far back in
the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling,
and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what
looked like a thumbs-up. Go on, the rising hum seemed to whisper, and
now it whispered in Henry Dean's voice. Go on, Eddie, show em what
you're made of. Didn't I tell those other guys? When we were out behind
Dahlie's smokin Jimmie Polio's cigarettes, didn't I tell em ? "My
little bro could talk the devil into settin himself on fire,"I said.
Didn't I?Yes. Yes he had. And that's the way I always felt, the hum
whispered. I always loved you. Sometimes I put you down, but I always
loved you. You were my little man.
Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.
Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn
ruin, from his mother and his cradle-amah right up to their visitors
from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of Tightness
grew. A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and
spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason.
There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the
song of the rose, and he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting
here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they lived; here
they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after
all.
They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the
nail-studded boards and the holes into which an ankle could plunge and
twist and perhaps break. Roland didn't know if one could break a bone
while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.
"This is worth everything," he said hoarsely.
Eddie nodded. "I'll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die."
Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The
sound was sweet in Roland's ears. It was darker in here than it had
been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and
Forty-sixth were strong enough to provide at least some illumination.
Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. "See that? It's the
deli sign. I pulled it out of th weeds. That's why it is where it is."
He looked around, dien pointed in anodier direction. "And look!"
This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it.
Although neither of them had seen it before, they both felt a strong
sense of deja vu, nonetheless.
MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO
REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!
COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:
TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!
CALL 661-6712 FOR INFORMATION!
YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!
As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either
refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had remembered the graffito
which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from
Jake's story, not because it meant anything to him but simply because
it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: bango skank. Some
long-gone tagger's calling card.
"I think the telephone number on the sign's different," Jake said.
"Yeah?" Eddie asked. "What was the old one?"
"I don't remember."
"Then how can you be sure this one's different?"
In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by
these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled,
instead. "I don't know. I guess I can't. But it sure seems different.
Like the sign in the bookstore window."
Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks
and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes
brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was
something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version
of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing
from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint.
He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on
his left, Jake on his right.
The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt
there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all
around them, like a song of angels.
THIRTEEN
At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she
had lost over a foot and a half of herself-the self that had arrived
here, anyway-and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully
subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy
sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant
lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind-All I need's a cardboard
sign and a tin cup.
She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street.
The singing helped-what she understood to be the voice of the rose.
Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky
fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself
again and again that she was not insane. All right, she'd lost seven
minutes. Maybe. Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down
there had just hiccupped. All right, she'd seen a dead woman crossing
the street. Maybe. Or maybe she'd just seen some strung-out junkie, God
knew there was no shortage of them in New York-
A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth ?
"I could have imagined that part," she said to the bumbler. "Right?"
Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing
headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory
animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.
"Besides, the boys'll be back soon."
"Oys," the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.
Why didn't I just go in with em ? Eddie would have carried me on his
back, God knows he's done it before, both with the harness and
without it.
"I couldn't," she whispered. "I just couldn't."
Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too
close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven
minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had
taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa
1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that
was good. She didn't want to be afraid of something that felt so strong
and so wonderful.
Another personality ? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs
was another personality ?
Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?
The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood
how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently
successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had
picked up a shadow on her lung.
"Not again," she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of
pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a
little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. "No,
not again. It can't be. I'm whole. I'm... I'm fixed."
How long had her friends been gone?
She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she
wasn't sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer.
Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y'all doin in
there?
No. No such thing. You're a gunslinger, girl. At least that's what he
says. What he thinks. And you're not going to change what he thinks by
hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush.
You're just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You've got Oy
for company and you-
Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just
standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn
up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and
branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her.
Through the world.
Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended
when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead
man.
Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.
FOURTEEN
When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals
and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that
mattered.
"Oh my Lord," Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a
thousand miles away.
Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not
quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage
boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite
stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi
Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the
D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the
entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest
stop on 1-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald's french fries on his lap.
He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a
crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The
terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the
thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men
rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist
of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of
small things, from planes which hadn't crashed to men and women who had
come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded
generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned
and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right
fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren't random, ten
thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million
acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River
Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha's blessing;
again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to
lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak
the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower
itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its
purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that
were and held them steady in time's great helix. For every brick that
landed on the ground instead of some little kid's head, for every
tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn't
fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.
And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all
might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be
well.
But something's wrong with it, he thought.
There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken
glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some
cold light that did not belong diere.
"There are two hubs of existence," he heard Roland say. "Two!" Like
Jake, he could have been a thousand miles away. "The Tower... and the
rose. Yet they are the same."
"The same," Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light,
dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie thought he could see that other
light, as well-a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it
danced on Jake's forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of
his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his temple like the physical
manifestation of a bad idea.
"What's wrong with it?" Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no
answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not from the rose.
Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw.
But there was really no need to count. They all knew how many petals
there were.
"We must have this patch," Roland said. "Own it and then protect it.
Until the Beams are reestablished and the Tower is made safe again.
Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything
together. And this is weakening, too. It's sick. Do you feel it?"
Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when
Susannah began to scream. A moment later Oy joined his voice to hers,
barking wildly.
Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other like sleepers awakened
from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made it to his feet first. He turned
and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her
name. Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out
of the snarl of burdocks where the key had been before.
Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so
bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of bricks and boards and weeds
and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the
light that blazed within.
I'll come back, he told it. I swear by the gods of all the worlds, by
my mother and father and my friends that were, that I'll come back.
Yet he was afraid.
Roland turned and ran for the board fence, picking his way through the
tumbled litter with unconscious agility in spite of the pain in his
hip. As he ran, one thought returned to him and beat at his mind like a
heart: Two. Two hubs of existence. The rose and the Tower. The Tower
and the rose.
All the rest was held between them, spinning in fragile complexity.
FIFTEEN
Eddie threw himself over the fence, landed badly and asprawl, leaped to
his feet, and stepped in front of Susannah without even thinking. Oy
continued to bark.
"Suze! What? What is it?" He reached for Roland's gun and found
nodüng. It seemed that guns did not go todash.
"There!" she cried, pointing across the street. "There! Do you see him?
Please, Eddie, please tell me you see him!"
Eddie felt the temperature of his blood plummet. What he saw was a
naked man who had been cut open and then sewed up again in what could
only be an autopsy tattoo. Another man-a living one-bought a paper
at the nearby newsstand, checked for traffic, then crossed Second
Avenue. Although he was shaking open the paper to look at the headline
as he did it, Eddie saw die way he swerved around the dead man. The way
people swerved around us, he thought.
"There was another one, too," she whispered. "A woman. She was walking.
And there was a worm. I saw a worm c-c-crawling-"
"Look to your right," Jake said tightly. He was down on one knee,
stroking Oy back to quietness. In his other hand he held a crumpled
pink something. His face was as pale as cottage cheese.
They looked. A child was wandering slowly toward them. It was only
possible to tell it was a girl because of the red-and-blue dress she
wore. When she got closer, Eddie saw that the blue was supposed to be
the ocean. The red blobs resolved themselves into little candy-colored
sailboats. Her head had been squashed in some cruel accident, squashed
until it was wider than it was long. Her eyes were crushed grapes. Over
one pale arm was a white plastic purse. A little girl's best
I'm-going-to-the-car-accident-and-don't-know-it purse.
Susannah drew in breath to scream. The darkness she had only sensed
earlier was now almost visible. Certainly it was palpable; it pressed
against her like earth. Yet she would scream. She must scream. Scream
or go mad.
"Not a sound," Roland of Gilead whispered in her ear. "Do not disturb
her, poor lost thing. For your life, Susannah!" Susannah's scream
expired in a long, horrified sigh.
"They're dead," Jake said in a thin, controlled voice. "Both of them."
"The vagrant dead," Roland replied. "I heard of them from Alain Johns's
father. It must have been not long after we returned from Mejis, for
after that there wasn't much more time before everything... what is it
you say, Susannah? Before everything 'went to hell in a handbasket.' In
any case, it was Burning Chris who warned us that if we ever went
todash, we might see vags." He pointed across the street where the
naked dead man still stood. "Such as him yonder have either died so
suddenly they don't yet understand what's happened to them, or they
simply refuse to accept it. Sooner or later they do go on. I don't
think there are many of them."
"Thank God," Eddie said. "It's like something out of a George Romero
zombie movie."
"Susannah, what happened to your legs?" Jake asked.
"I don't know," she said. "One minute I had em, and the next minute I
was the same as before." She seemed to become aware of Roland's gaze
and turned toward him. "You see somethin funny, sugar?"
"We are ka-tet, Susannah. Tell us what really happened."
"What the hell are you trying to imply?" Eddie asked him. He might have
had said more, but before he could get started, Susannah grasped his
arm.
"Caught me out, didn't you?" she asked Roland. "All right, I'll tell
you. According to that fancy dot-clock down there, I lost seven minutes
while I was waiting for you boys. Seven minutes and my fine new legs. I
didn't want to say anything because..." She faltered, then went on.
"Because I was afraid I might be losing my mind."
That's not what you're afraid of, Roland thought. Not exactly. ' Eddie
gave her a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. He glanced nervously
across the street at the nude corpse (the little girl with the squashed
head had, thankfully, wandered off down Forty-sixth Street toward the
United Nations), then back at the gunslinger. "If what you said before
is true, Roland, this business of time slipping its cogs is very bad
news. What if instead of just seven minutes, it slips three months?
What if the next time we get back here, Calvin Tower's sold his lot? We
can't let that happen. Because that rose, man... that rose..." Tears
had begun to slip out of Eddie's eyes.
"It's the best thing in the world," Jake said, low.
"In all the worlds," Roland said. Would it ease Eddie and Jake to know
that this particular time-slip had probably been in Susannah's head?
That Mia had come out for seven minutes, had a look around, and then
dived back into her hole like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day?
Probably not. But he saw one thing in Susannah's haggard face: she
either knew what was going on, or suspected very strongly. It must be
hellish for her, he thought.
"We have to do better than this if we're really going to change
things," Jake said. "This way we're not much better than vags
ourselves."
"We have to get to '64, too," Susannah said. "If we're going to get
hold of my dough, that is. Can we, Roland? If Callahan's got Black
Thirteen, will it work like a door?"
What it will work is mischief, Roland thought. Mischief and worse. But
before he could say that (or anything else), the todash chimes began.
The pedestrians on Second Avenue heard them no more than they saw the
pilgrims gathered by the board fence, but the corpse across the street
slowly raised his dead hands and placed them over his dead ears, his
mouth turn-ing down in a grimace of pain. And then they could see
through him.
"Hold onto each other," Roland said. "Jake, get your hand into Oy's
fur, and deep! Never mind if it hurts him!"
Jake did as Roland said, the chimes digging deep into his head.
Beautiful but painful.
"Like a root canal without Novocain," Susannah said. She turned her
head and for one moment she could see through the board fence. It had
become transparent. Beyond it was the rose, its petals now closed but
still giving off its own quietly gorgeous glow. She felt Eddie's arm
slip around her shoulders.
"Hold on, Suze-whatever you do, hold on."
She grasped Roland's hand. For a moment longer she could see Second
Avenue, and then everything was gone. The chimes ate up the world and
she was flying through blind darkness with Eddie's arm around her and
Roland's hand squeezing her own.
SIXTEEN
When the darkness let them go, they were almost forty feet down the
road from their camp. Jake sat up slowly, then turned to Oy. "You all
right, boy?"
"Oy."
Jake patted the bumbler's head. He looked around at the others. All
here. He sighed, relieved.
"What's this?" Eddie asked. He had taken Jake's other hand when the
chimes began. Now, caught in their interlocked fingers, was a crumpled
pink object. It felt like cloth; it also felt like metal.
"I don't know," Jake said.
"You picked it up in the lot, just after Susannah screamed," Roland
said. "I saw you."
Jake nodded. "Yeah. I guess maybe I did. Because it was where the key
was, before."
"What is it, sugar?"
"Some kind of bag." He held it by the straps. "I'd say it was my
bowling bag, but that's back at the lanes, with my ball inside it. Back
in 1977."
"What's written on the side?" Eddie asked.
But they couldn't make it out. The clouds had closed in again and there
was no moonlight. They walked back to their camp together, slowly,
shaky as invalids, and Roland built up the fire. Then they looked at
the writing on the side of the rose-pink bowling bag.
NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES
was what it said.
"That's not right," Jake said. "Almost, but not quite. What it says on
my bag is nothing but strikes mid-town lanes. Timmy gave it to me one
day when I bowled a two-eighty-two. He said I wasn't old enough for him
to buy me a beer."
"A bowling gunslinger," Eddie said, and shook his head. "Wonders never
cease, do they?"
Susannah took the bag and ran her hands over it. "What kind of weave is
this? Feels like metal. And it's heazry."
Roland, who had an idea what the bag was for-although not who or what
had left it for them-said, "Put it in your knapsack with the books,
Jake. And keep it very safe."
"What do we do next?" Eddie asked.
"Sleep," Roland said. "I think we're going to be very busy for the next
few weeks. We'll have to take our sleep when and where we find it."
"But-"
"Sleep," Roland said, and spread out his skins.
Eventually they did, and all of them dreamed of the rose. Except for
Mia, who got up in the night's last dark hour and slipped away to feast
in the great banquet hall. And there she feasted very well.
She was, after all, eating for two.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 25 Feb 2005 00:26:36 -0800
--------
Part Two: Telling Tales -- Chapter I: The Pavilion
One
If anything about the ride into Calla Bryn Sturgis surprised Eddie, it
was how easily and naturally he took to horseback. Unlike Susannah and
Jake, who had both ridden at summer camp, Eddie had never even petted a
horse. When he'd heard the clop of approaching hooves on the morning
after what he thought of as Todash Number Two, he'd felt a sharp pang
of dread. It wasn't the riding he was afraid of, or the animals
themselves; it was the possibility-hell, the strong probability- of
looking like a fool. What kind of gunslinger had never ridden a horse?
Yet Eddie still found time to pass a word with Roland before they came.
"It wasn't the same last night."
Roland raised his eyebrows.
"It wasn't nineteen last night."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know what I mean."
"I don't know, either," Jake put in, "but he's right. Last night New
York felt like the real deal. I mean, I know we were todash, but
still..."
"Real," Roland had mused.
And Jake, smiling, said: "Real as roses."
TWO
The Slightmans were at the head of the Calla's party this time, each
leading a pair of mounts by long hacks. There was nothing very
intimidating about the horses of Calla Bryn Sturgis; certainly they
weren't much like the ones Eddie had imagined galloping along the Drop
in Roland's tale of long-ago Mejis. These beasts were stubby,
sturdy-legged creatures with shaggy coats and large, intelligent eyes.
They were bigger than Shetland ponies, but a very long cast from the
fiery-eyed stallions he had been expecting. Not only had they been
saddled, but a proper bedroll had been lashed to each mount.
As Eddie walked toward his (he didn't need to be told which it was, he
knew: the roan), all his doubts and worries fell away. He only asked a
single question, directed at Ben Slightman the Younger after examining
the stirrups. "These are going to be too short for me, Ben-can you
show me how to make them longer?"
When the boy dismounted to do it himself, Eddie shook his head. "It'd
be best if I learned," he said. And with no embarrassment at all.
As the boy showed him, Eddie realized he didn't really need the lesson.
He saw how it was done almost as soon as Benny's fingers flipped up the
stirrup, revealing the leather tug in back. This wasn't like hidden,
subconscious knowledge, and it didn't strike him as anything
supernatural, either. It was just that, with the horse a warm and
fragrant reality before him, he understood how everything worked. He'd
only had one experience exactly like this since coming to Mid-World,
and that had been the first time he'd strapped on one of Roland's guns.
"Need help, sugar?" Susannah asked.
"Just pick me up if I go off on the other side," he grunted, but of
course he didn't do any such thing. The horse stood steady, swaying
just the slightest bit as Eddie stepped into the stirrup and then swung
into the plain black ranchhand's saddle.
Jake asked Benny if he had a poncho. The foreman's son looked
doubtfully up at the cloudy sky. "I really don't think it's going to
rain," he'd said. "It's often like this for days around Reaptide-"
"I want it for Oy." Perfectly calm, perfectly certain. He feels exactly
like I do, Eddie thought. As if he's done this a thousand times before.
The boy drew a rolled oilskin from one of his saddlebags and handed it
to Jake, who thanked him, put it on, and then tucked Oy into the
capacious pocket which ran across the front like a kangaroo's pouch.
There wasn't a single protest from the bumbler, either. Eddie thought:
If I told Jake I'd expected Oy to trot along behind us like a sheepdog,
would he say, "He always rides like this"?No ... but he might think it.
As they set off, Eddie realized what all this reminded him of: stories
he'd heard of reincarnation. He had tried to shake the idea off, to
reclaim the practical, tough-minded Brooklyn boy who had grown up in
Henry Dean's shadow, and wasn't quite able to do it. The thought of
reincarnation might have been less unsettling if it had come to him
head-on, but it didn't. What he thought was that he couldn't be from
Roland's line, simply couldn't. Not unless Arthur Eld had at some point
stopped by Co-Op City, that was. Like maybe for a redhot and a piece of
Dahlie Lundgren's fried dough. Stupid to project such an idea from the
ability to ride an obviously docile horse without lessons. Yet the
idea came back at odd moments through the day, and had followed him
down into sleep last night: the Eld. The line of the Eld.
THREE
They nooned in the saddle, and while they were eating popkins and
drinking cold coffee, Jake eased his mount in next to Roland's. Oy
peered at the gunslinger with bright eyes from the front pocket of the
poncho. Jake was feeding the bumbler pieces of his popkin, and there
were crumbs caught in Oy's whiskers.
"Roland, may I speak to you as dinh?" Jake sounded slightly
embarrassed.
"Of course." Roland drank coffee and then looked at the boy,
interested, all the while rocking contentedly back and forth in the
saddle.
"Ben-that is, both Slightmans, but mostly the kid-asked if I'd come
and stay with them. Out at the Rocking B."
"Do you want to go?" Roland asked.
The boy's cheeks flushed thin red. "Well, what I thought is that if you
guys were in town with the Old Fella and I was out in the
country-south of town, you ken-then we'd get two different pictures
of the place. My Dad says you don't see anything very well if you only
look at it from one viewpoint."
"True enough," Roland said, and hoped neither his voice nor his face
would give away any of the sorrow and regret he suddenly felt. Here was
a boy who was now ashamed of being a boy. He had made a friend and the
friend had invited him to stay over, as friends sometimes do. Benny had
undoubtedly promised that Jake could help him feed the animals, and
perhaps shoot his bow (or his bah, if it shot bolts instead of arrows).
There would be places Benny would want to share, secret places he might
have gone to with his twin in other times. A platform in a tree,
mayhap, or a fishpond in the reeds special to him, or a stretch of
riverbank where pirates of eld were reputed to have buried gold and
jewels. Such places as boys go. But a large part of Jake Chambers was
now ashamed to want to do such things. This was the part that had been
despoiled by the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock
Man. And by Roland himself, of course. Were he to say no to Jake's
request now, the boy would very likely never ask again. And never
resent him for it, which was even worse. Were he to say yes in the
wrong way-with even the slightest trace of indulgence in his voice,
for instance-the boy would change his mind.
The boy. The gunslinger realized how much he wanted to be able to go on
calling Jake that, and how short the time to do so was apt to be. He
had a bad feeling about Calla Bryn Sturgis.
"Go with them after they dine us in the Pavilion tonight," Roland said.
"Go and do ya fine, as they say here."
"Are you sure? Because if you think you might need me-"
"Your father's saying is a good one. My old teacher-"
"Cort or Vannay?"
"Cort. He used to tell us that a one-eyed man sees flat. It takes two
eyes, set a little apart from each other, to see things as they really
are. So aye. Go with them. Make the boy your friend, if that seems
natural. He seems likely enough."
"Yeah," Jake said briefly. But the color was going down in his cheeks
again. Roland was pleased to see this.
"Spend tomorrow with him. And his friends, if he has a gang he goes
about with."
Jake shook his head. "It's far out in the country. Ben says that
Eisenhart's got plenty of help around the place, and there are some
kids his age, but he's not allowed to play with them. Because he's the
foreman's son, I guess."
Roland nodded. This did not surprise him. "You'll be offered graf
tonight in the Pavilion. Do you need me to tell you it's iced tea once
we're past the first toast?"
Jake shook his head.
Roland touched his temple, his lips, the corner of one eye, his lips
again. "Head clear. Mouth shut. See much. Say little."
Jake grinned briefly and gave him a thumbs-up. "What about you?"
"The three of us will stay with the priest tonight. I'm in hopes that
tomorrow we may hear his tale."
"And see..." They had fallen a bit behind the others, but Jake still
lowered his voice. "See what he told us about?"
"That I don't know," Roland said. "The day after tomorrow, we three
will ride out to the Rocking B. Perhaps noon with sai Eisenhart and
have a bit of palaver. Then, over the next few days, the four of us
will have a look at this town, both the inner and the outer. If things
go well for you at the ranch, Jake, I'd have you stay there as long as
you like and as much as they'll have you."
"Really?" Although he kept his face well (as the saying went), the
gunslinger thought Jake was very pleased by this.
"Aye. From what I make out-what I ken-there's three big bugs in
Calla Bryn Sturgis. Overholser's one. Took, the storekeeper, is
another. The third one's Eisenhart. I'd hear what you make of him with
great interest."
"You'll hear," Jake said. "And thankee-sai." He tapped his throat three
times. Then his seriousness broke into a broad grin. A boy's grin. He
urged his horse into a trot, moving up to tell his new friend that yes,
he might stay the night, yes, he could come and play.
FOUR
"Holy wow," Eddie said. The words came out low and slow, almost the
exclamation of an awestruck cartoon character. But after nearly two
months in the woods, the view warranted an exclamation. And there was
the element of surprise. At one moment they'd just been clopping along
the forest trail, mostly by twos (Overholser rode alone at the head of
the group, Roland alone at its tail). At the next the trees were gone
and the land itself fell away to the north, south, and east. They were
thus presented with a sudden, breathtaking, stomach-dropping view of
the town whose children they were supposed to save.
Yet at first, Eddie had no eyes at all for what was spread out directly
below him, and when he glanced at Susannah and Jake, he saw they were
also looking beyond the Calla. Eddie didn't have to look around at
Roland to know he was looking beyond, too. Definition of a wanderer,
Eddie thought, a guy who's always looking beyond.
"Aye, quite the view, we tell the gods thankee," Overholser said
complacently; and then, with a glance at Callahan, "Man Jesus as well,
a'course, all gods is one when it comes to thanks, so I've heard, and
'tis a good enough saying."
He might have prattled on. Probably did; when you were the big farmer,
you usually got to have your say, and all the way to the end. Eddie
took no notice. He had returned his attention to the view.
Ahead of them, beyond the village, was a gray band of river running
south. The branch of the Big River known as Devar-Tete Whye, Eddie
remembered. Where it came out of the forest, the Devar-Tete ran between
steep banks, but they lowered as the river entered the first cultivated
fields, then fell away entirely. He saw a few stands of palm trees,
green and improbably tropical. Beyond the moderate-sized village, the
land west of the river was a brilliant green shot through everywhere
with more gray. Eddie was sure that on a sunny day, that gray would
turn a brilliant blue, and that when the sun was directly overhead, the
glare would be too bright to look at. He was looking at rice-fields. Or
maybe you called them paddies.
Beyond them and east of the river was desert, stretching for miles.
Eddie could see parallel scratches of metal running into it, and made
them for railroad tracks.
And beyond the desert-or obscuring the rest of it-was simple
blackness. It rose into the sky like a vapory wall, seeming to cut into
the low-hanging clouds.
"Yon's Thunderclap, sai," Zalia Jaffords said.
Eddie nodded. "Land of the Wolves. And God knows what else."
"Yer-bugger," Slightman the Younger said. He was trying to sound bluff
and matter-of-fact, but to Eddie he looked plenty scared, maybe on the
verge of tears. But the Wolves wouldn't take him, surely-if your twin
died, that made you a singleton by default, didn't it? Well, it had
certainly worked for Elvis Presley, but of course the King hadn't come
from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Or even Calla Lockwood to the south.
"Naw, the King was a Mis'sippi boy," Eddie said, low.
Tian turned in his saddle to look at him. "Beg your pardon, sai?"
Eddie, not aware that he'd spoken aloud, said: "I'm sorry. I was
talking to myself."
Andy the Messenger Robot (Many Other Functions) came striding back up
the path from ahead of them in time to hear this. "Those who hold
conversation with themselves keep sorry company. This is an old saying
of the Calla, sai Eddie, don't take it personally, I beg."
"And, as I've said before and will undoubtedly say again, you can't get
snot off a suede jacket, my friend. An old saying from Calla Bryn
Brooklyn."
Andy's innards clicked. His blue eyes flashed. "Snot: mucus from the
nose. Also a disrespectful or supercilious person. Suede: this is a
leather product which-"
"Never mind, Andy," Susannah said. "My friend is just being silly. He
does this quite frequently."
"Oh yes," Andy said. "He is a child of winter. Would you like me to
tell your horoscope, Susannah-sai? You will meet a handsome man! You
will have two ideas, one bad and one good! You will have a
dark-haired-"
"Get out of here, idiot," Overholser said. "Right into town, straight
line, no wandering. Check that all's well at the Pavilion. No one wants
to hear your goddamned horoscopes, begging your pardon, Old Fella."
Callahan made no reply. Andy bowed, tapped his metal throat three
times, and set off down the trail, which was steep but comfortingly
wide. Susannah watched him go with what might have been relief.
"Kinda hard on him, weren't you?" Eddie asked.
"He's but a piece of machinery," Overholser said, breaking the last
word into syllables, as if speaking to a child.
"And he can be annoying," Tian said. "But tell me, sais, what do you
think of our Calla?"
Roland eased his horse in between Eddie's and Callahan's. "It's very
beautiful," he said. "Whatever the gods may be, they have favored this
place. I see corn, sharproot, beans, and... potatoes? Are those
potatoes?"
"Aye, spuds, do ya," Slightman said, clearly pleased by Roland's eye.
"And yon's all that gorgeous rice," Roland said.
"All smallholds by the river," Tian said, "where the water's sweet and
slow. And we know how lucky we are. When the rice comes ready-either
to plant or to harvest-all the women go together. There's singing in
the fields, and even dancing."
"Come-come-commala," Roland said. At least that was what Eddie heard.
Tian and Zalia brightened with surprise and recognition. The Slightmans
exchanged a glance and grinned. "Where did you hear The Rice Song?" die
Elder asked. "When?"
"In my home," said Roland. "Long ago. Come-come-commala, rice come
a-falla." He pointed to the west, away from the river. "There's the
biggest farm, deep in wheat. Yours, sai Overholser?"
"So it is, say thankya."
"And beyond, to the south, more farms... and then the ranches. That
one's cattle... that one sheep... that one cattle... more cattle...
more sheep..."
"How can you tell the difference from so far away?" Susannah asked.
"Sheep eat the grass closer to the earth, lady-sai," Overholser said.
"So where you see the light brown patches of earth, that's sheep-graze
land. The others-what you'd call ocher, I guess-that's
cattle-graze."
Eddie thought of all the Western movies he'd seen at the Majestic:
Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Lee Van Cleef. "In my
land, they tell legends of range-wars between the ranchers and the
sheep-farmers," he said. "Because, it was told, the sheep ate the grass
too close. Took even the roots, you ken, so it wouldn't grow back
again."
"That's plain silly, beg your pardon," Overholser said. "Sheep do crop
grass close, aye, but then we send the cows over it to water. The
manure they drop is full of seed."
"Ah," Eddie said. He couldn't think of anything else. Put that way, the
whole idea of range wars seemed exquisitely stupid.
"Come on," Overholser said. "Daylight's wasting, do ya, and there's a
feast laid on for us at the Pavilion. The whole town'll be there to
meet you."
And to give us a good looking-over, too, Eddie thought.
"Lead on," Roland said. "We can be there by late day. Or am I wrong?"
"Nup," Overholser said, then drove his feet into his horse's sides and
yanked its head around (just looking at this made Eddie wince). He
headed down the path. The others followed.
FIVE
Eddie never forgot their first encounter with those of the Calla; that
was one memory always within easy reach. Because everything that
happened had been a surprise, he supposed, and when everything's a
surprise, experience takes on a dreamlike quality. He remembered the
way the torches changed when the speaking was done-their strange,
varied light. He remembered Oy's unexpected salute to the crowd. The
upturned faces and his suffocating panic and his anger at Roland.
Susannah hoisting herself onto the piano bench in what the locals
called the musica. Oh yeah, that memory always. You bet. But even more
vivid than this memory of his beloved was that of the gunslinger.
Of Roland dancing.
But before any of these things came the ride down the Calla's high
street, and his sense of forboding. His premonition of bad days on the
way.
SIX
They reached the town proper an hour before sunset. The clouds parted
and let through the day's last red light. The street was empty. The
surface was oiled dirt. The horses' hooves made muffled thuds on the
wheel-marked hardpack. Eddie saw a livery stable, a place called the
Travelers' Rest that seemed a combination lodging-house and
eating-house, and, at the far end of the street, a large two-story that
just about had to be the Calla's Gathering Hall. Off to the right of
this was the flare of torches, so he supposed there were people waiting
there, but at the north end of town where they entered there were none.
The silence and the empty board sidewalks began to give Eddie the
creeps. He remembered Roland's tale of Susan's final ride into Mejis in
the back of a cart, standing with her hands tied in front of her and a
noose around her neck. Her road had been empty, too. At first. Then,
not far from the intersection of the Great Road and the Silk Ranch
Road, Susan and her captors had passed a single farmer, a man with what
Roland had called lamb-slaughterer's eyes. Later she would be pelted
with vegetables and sticks, even with stones, but this lone farmer had
been first, standing there with his handful of cornshucks, which he had
tossed almost gently at her as she passed on her way to... well, on her
way to charyou tree, the Reap Fair of the Old People.
As they rode into Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie kept expecting that man,
those lamb-slaughterer's eyes, and the handful of cornshucks. Because
this town felt bad to him. Not evil-evil as Mejis had likely been on
the night of Susan Delgado's death- but bad in a simpler way. Bad as
in bad luck, bad choices, bad omens. Bad ka, maybe.
He leaned toward Slightman the Elder. "Where in the heck is everyone,
Ben?"
"Yonder," Slightman said, and pointed to the flare of the torches.
"Why are they so quiet?" Jake asked.
"They don't know what to expect," Callahan said. "We're cut off here.
The outsiders we do see from time to time are the occasional peddler,
harrier, gambler... oh, and the lake-boat marts sometimes stop in high
summer."
"What's a lake-boat mart?" Susannah asked.
Callahan described a wide flatboat, paddlewheel-driven and gaily
painted, covered with small shops. These made their slow way down the
Devar-Tete Whye, stopping to trade at the Callas of the Middle Crescent
until their goods were gone. Shoddy stuff for the most part, Callahan
said, but Eddie wasn't sure he trusted him entirely, at least on the
subject of the lake-boat marts; he spoke with the almost unconscious
distaste of the longtime religious.
"And the other outsiders come to steal their children," Callahan
concluded. He pointed to the left, where a long wooden building seemed
to take up almost half the high street. Eddie counted not two hitching
rails or four, but eight. Long ones. "Took's General Store, may it do
ya fine," Callahan said, with what might have been sarcasm.
They reached the Pavilion. Eddie later put the number present at seven
or eight hundred, but when he first saw them- a mass of hats and
bonnets and boots and work-roughened hands beneath the long red light
of that day's evening sun-the crowd seemed enormous, untellable.
They will throw shit at us, he thought. Throw shit at us and yell
"Charyou tree." The idea was ridiculous but also strong.
The Calla-folk moved back on two sides, creating an aisle of green
grass which led to a raised wooden platform. Ringing the Pavilion were
torches caught in iron cages. At that point, they still all flared a
quite ordinary yellow. Eddie's nose caught the strong reek of oil.
Overholser dismounted. So did the others of his party. Eddie, Susannah,
and Jake looked at Roland. Roland sat as he was for a moment, leaning
slightly forward, one arm cast across the pommel of his saddle, seeming
lost in his own thoughts. Then he took off his hat and held it out to
the crowd. He tapped his throat three times. The crowd murmured. In
appreciation or surprise? Eddie couldn't tell. Not anger, though,
definitely not anger, and that was good. The gunslinger lifted one
booted foot across the saddle and lightly dismounted. Eddie left his
horse more carefully, aware of all the eyes on him. He'd put on
Susannah's harness earlier, and now he stood next to her mount,
back-to. She slipped into the harness with the ease of long practice.
The crowd murmured again when they saw her legs were missing from just
above the knees.
Overholser started briskly up the path, shaking a few hands along the
way. Callahan walked directly behind him, occasionally sketching the
sign of the cross in the air. Other hands reached out of the crowd to
secure the horses. Roland, Eddie, and Jake walked three abreast. Oy was
still in the wide front pocket of the poncho Benny had loaned Jake,
looking about with interest.
Eddie realized he could actually smell the crowd-sweat and hair and
sunburned skin and the occasional splash of what the characters in the
Western movies usually called (with contempt similar to Callahan's for
the lake-boat marts) "foo-foo water." He could also smell food: pork
and beef, fresh bread, frying onions, coffee and graf. His stomach
rumbled, yet he wasn't hungry. No, not really hungry. The idea that the
path they were walking would disappear and these people would close in
on them wouldn't leave his mind. They were so quiet! Somewhere close
by he could hear the first nightjars and whippoor-wills tuning up for
evening.
Overholser and Callahan mounted the platform. Eddie was alarmed to see
that none of the others of the party which had ridden out to meet them
did. Roland walked up the three broad wooden steps without hesitation,
however. Eddie followed, conscious that his knees were a little weak.
"You all right?" Susannah murmured in his ear.
"So far."
To the left of the platform was a round stage with seven men on it, all
dressed in white shirts, blue jeans, and sashes. Eddie recognized the
instruments they were holding, and although the mandolin and banjo made
him think their music would probably be of the shitkicking variety, the
sight of them was still reassuring. They didn't hire bands to play at
human sacrifices, did they? Maybe just a drummer or two, to wind up the
spectators.
Eddie turned to face the crowd with Susannah on his back. He was
dismayed to see that the aisle that had begun where the high street
ended was indeed gone now. Faces tilted up to look at him. Women and
men, old and young. No expression on those faces, and no children among
them. These were faces that spent most of their time out in the sun and
had the cracks to prove it. That sense of foreboding would not leave
him.
Overholser stopped beside a plain wooden table. On it was a large
billowy feather. The farmer took it and held it up. The crowd, quiet to
begin with, now fell into a silence so disquietingly deep that Eddie
could hear the rattling rales in some old party's chest as he or she
breathed.
"Put me down, Eddie," Susannah said quietly. He didn't like to, but he
did.
"I'm Wayne Overholser of Seven-Mile Farm," Overholser said, stepping to
the edge of the stage with the feather held before him. "Hear me now, I
beg."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured.
Overholser turned and held one hand out to Roland and his tet, standing
there in their travel-stained clothes (Susannah didn't stand, exactly,
but rested between Eddie and Jake on her haunches and one propped
hand). Eddie thought he had never felt himself studied more eagerly.
"We men of the Calla heard Tian Jaffords, George Telford, Diego Adams,
and all others who would speak at the Gathering Hall," Overholser said.
"There I did speak myself. 'They'll come and take the children,' I
said, meaning the Wolves, a'course, 'then they'll leave us alone again
for a generation or more. So 'tis, so it's been, I say leave it alone.'
I think now those words were mayhap a little hasty."
A murmur from the crowd, soft as a breeze.
"At this same meeting we heard Pere Callahan say there were gunslingers
north of us."
Another murmur. This one was a little louder. Gunslingers...
Mid-World... Gilead.
"It was taken among us that a party should go and see. These are the
folk we found, do ya. They claim to be... what Pere Callahan said they
were." Overholser now looked uncomfortable. Almost as if he were
suppressing a fart. Eddie had seen this expression before, mostly on
TV, when politicians faced with some fact they couldn't squirm around
were forced to backtrack. "They claim to be of the gone world. Which
is to say..."
Go on, Wayne, Eddie thought, get it out. You can do it.
"... which is to say of Eld's line."
"Gods be praised!" some woman shrieked. "Gods've sent em to save our
babbies, so they have!"
There were shushing sounds. Overholser waited for quiet with a pained
look on his face, then went on. "They can speak for themselves-and
must-but I've seen enough to believe they may be able to help us with
our problem. They carry good guns-you see em-and they can use em.
Set my watch and warrant on it, and say thankya."
This time the murmur from the crowd was louder, and Eddie sensed
goodwill in it. He relaxed a little.
"All right, then, let em stand before'ee one by one, that ye might hear
their voices and see their faces very well. This is their dinh." He
lifted a hand to Roland.
The gunslinger stepped forward. The red sun set his left cheek on fire;
the right was painted yellow with torchglow. He put out one leg. The
thunk of the worn bootheel on the boards was very clear in the silence;
Eddie for no reason thought of a fist knocking on a coffintop. He bowed
deeply, open palms held out to them. "Roland of Gilead, son of Steven,"
he said. "The Line of Eld."
They sighed.
"May we be well-met." He stepped back, and glanced at Eddie.
This part he could do. "Eddie Dean of New York," he said. "Son of
Wendell." At least that's what Ma always claimed, he thought. And then,
unaware he was going to say it: "The Line of Eld. The ka-tet of
Nineteen."
He stepped back, and Susannah moved forward to the edge of the
platform. Back straight, looking out at them calmly, she said, "I am
Susannah Dean, wife of Eddie, daughter of Dan, the Line of Eld, the
ka-tet of Nineteen, may we be well-met and do ya fine." She curtsied,
holding out her pretend skirts.
At this there was both laughter and applause.
While she spoke her piece, Roland bent to whisper a brief something in
Jake's ear. Jake nodded and then stepped forward confidently. He looked
very young and very handsome in the day's end light.
He put out his foot and bowed over it. The poncho swung comically
forward with Oy's weight. "I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line
of Eld, the ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine."
Ninety-nine? Eddie looked at Susannah, who offered him a very small
shrug. What's this ninety-nine shit? Then he thought what the hell. He
didn't know what the ka-tet of Nineteen was, either, and he'd said it
himself.
But Jake wasn't done. He lifted Oy from the pocket of Benny Slightman's
poncho. The crowd murmured at the sight of him. Jake gave Roland a
quick glance-Are you sure? it asked- and Roland nodded.
At first Eddie didn't think Jake's furry pal was going to do anything.
The people of the Calla-the folken-had gone completely quiet again,
so quiet that once again the evensong of the birds could be heard
clearly.
Then Oy rose up on his rear legs, stuck one of them forward, and
actually bowed over it. He wavered but kept his balance. His little
black paws were held out with the palms up, like Roland's. There were
gasps, laughter, applause. Jake looked thunderstruck.
"Oy!" said the bumbler. "Eld! Thankee!" Each word clear. He held the
bow a moment longer, then dropped onto all fours and scurried briskly
back to Jake's side. The applause was thunderous. In one brilliant,
simple stroke, Roland (for who else, Eddie thought, could have taught
die bumbler to do that) had made these people into their friends and
admirers. For tonight, at least.
So that was the first surprise: Oy bowing to the assembled Calla folken
and declaring himself an-tet with his traveling-mates. The second came
hard on its heels. "I'm no speaker," Roland said, stepping forward
again. "My tongue tangles worse than a drunk's on Reap-night. But Eddie
will set us on with a word, I'm sure."
This was Eddie's turn to be thunderstruck. Below them, the crowd
applauded and stomped appreciatively on the ground. There were cries of
Thankee-sai and Speak you well and Hear him, hear him. Even the band
got into the act, playing a flourish that was ragged but loud.
He had time to shoot Roland a single frantic, furious look: What in the
blue fuck are you doing to me? The gunslinger looked back blandly, then
folded his arms across his chest. The applause was fading. So was his
anger. It was replaced by terror. Overholser was watching him with
interest, arms crossed in conscious or unconscious imitation of Roland.
Below him, Eddie could see a few individual faces at the front of the
crowd: the Slightmans, the Jaffordses. He looked in the other direction
and there was Callahan, blue eyes narrowed. Above them, the ragged
cruciform scar on his forehead seemed to glare.
What the hell am I supposed to say to them ?
Better say somethin, Eds, his brother Henry spoke up. They're waiting.
"Cry your pardon if I'm a little slow getting started," he said.
"We've come miles and wheels and more miles and wheels, and you're the
first folks we've seen in many a-"
Many a what? Week, month, year, decade?
Eddie laughed. To himself he sounded like the world's biggest idiot, a
fellow who couldn't be trusted to hold his own dick at watering-time,
let alone a gun. "In many a blue moon."
They laughed at that, and hard. Some even applauded. He had touched the
town's funnybone without even realizing it. He relaxed, and when he did
he found himself speaking quite naturally. It occurred to him, just in
passing, that not so long ago the armed gunslinger standing in front of
these seven hundred frightened, hopeful people had been sitting in
front of the TV in nothing but a pair of yellowing underpants, eating
Cheetos, done up on heroin, and watching Yogi Bear.
"We've come from afar," he said, "and have far yet to go. Our time here
will be short, but we'll do what we can, hear me, I beg."
"Say on, stranger!" someone called. "You speak fair!"
Yeah ? Eddie thought. News to me, fella.
A few cries of Aye and Do ya.
"The healers in my barony have a saying," Eddie told them. 'First, do
no harm.' " He wasn't sure if this was a lawyer-motto or a
doctor-motto, but he'd heard it in quite a few movies and TV shows, and
it sounded pretty good. "We would do no harm here, do you ken, but no
one ever pulled a bullet, or even a splinter from under a kid's
fingernail, without spilling some blood."
There were murmurs of agreement. Overholser, however, was poker-faced,
and in the crowd Eddie saw looks of doubt. He felt a surprising flush
of anger. He had no right to be angry at these people, who had done
them absolutely no harm and had refused them absolutely nothing (at
least so far), but he was, just the same.
"We've got another saying in the barony of New York," he told them. "
'There ain't no free lunch.' From what we know of your situation, it's
serious. Standing up against these Wolves would be dangerous. But
sometimes doing nothing just makes people feel sick and hungry."
"Hear him, hear him!" the same someone at the back of the crowd called
out. Eddie saw Andy the robot back there, and near him a large wagon
full of men in voluminous cloaks of either black or dark blue. Eddie
assumed that these were the Manni-folk.
"We'll look around," Eddie said, "and once we understand the problem,
we'll see what can be done. If we think the answer's nothing, we'll tip
our hats to you and move along." Two or three rows back stood a man in
a battered white cowboy hat. He had shaggy white eyebrows and a white
mustache to match. Eddie thought he looked quite a bit like Pa
Cartwright on that old TV show, Bonanza. This version of the Cartwright
patriarch looked less than thrilled with what Eddie was saying.
"If we can help, we'll help," he said. His voice was utterly flat now.
"But we won't do it alone, folks. Hear me, I beg. Hear me very well.
You better be ready to stand up for what you want. You better be ready
to fight for the things you'd keep."
With that he stuck out a foot in front of him-the moccasin he wore
didn't produce the same fist-on-coffintop thud, but Eddie thought of
it, all the same-and bowed. There was dead silence. Then Tian
Jaffords began to clap. Zalia joined him. Benny also applauded. His
father nudged him, but the boy went on clapping, and after a moment
Slightman the Elder joined in.
Eddie gave Roland a burning look. Roland's own bland expression didn't
change. Susannah tugged the leg of his pants and Eddie bent to her.
"You did fine, sugar."
"No thanks to him." Eddie nodded at Roland. But now that it was over,
he felt surprisingly good. And talking was really not Roland's thing,
Eddie knew that. He could do it when he had no backup, but he didn't
care for it.
So now you know what you are, he thought. Roland of Gilead's
mouthpiece.
And yet was that so bad? Hadn't Cuthbert Allgood had the job long
before him?
Callahan stepped forward. "Perhaps we could set them on a bit better
than we have, my friends-give them a proper Calla Bryn Sturgis
welcome."
He began to applaud. The gathered folken joined in immediately this
time. The applause was long and lusty. There were cheers, whistles,
stamping feet (the foot-stamping a little less than satisfying without
a wood floor to amplify the sound). The musical combo played not just
one flourish but a whole series of them. Susannah grasped one of
Eddie's hands. Jake grasped the other. The four of them bowed like some
rock group at the end of a particularly good set, and the applause
redoubled.
At last Callahan quieted it by raising his hands. "Serious work ahead,
folks," he said. "Serious things to think about, serious things to do.
But for now, let's eat. Later, let's dance and sing and be merry!" They
began to applaud again and Callahan quieted them again. "Enough!" he
cried, laughing. "And you Manni at the back, I know you haul your own
rations, but there's no reason on earth for you not to eat and drink
what you have with us. Join us, do ya! May it do ya fine!"
May it do us all fine, Eddie thought, and still that sense of
foreboding wouldn't leave him. It was like a guest standing on the
outskirts of the party, just beyond the glow of the torches. And it was
like a sound. A boot heel on a wooden floor. A fist on the lid of a
coffin.
SEVEN
Although there were benches and long trestle tables, only the old folks
ate their dinners sitting down. And a famous dinner it was, with
literally two hundred dishes to choose among, most of them homely and
delicious. The doings began with a toast to the Calla. It was proposed
by Vaughn Eisenhart, who stood with a bumper in one hand and the
feather in the other. Eddie thought this was probably the Crescent's
version of the National Anthem.
"May she always do fine!" the rancher cried, and tossed off his cup of
graf in one long swallow. Eddie admired the man's throat, if nothing
else; Calla Bryn Sturgis graf was so hard that just smelling it made
his eyes water.
"DO YA!" the folken responded, and cheered, and drank.
At that moment the torches ringing the Pavilion went the deep crimson
of the recently departed sun. The crowd oohed and aahed and applauded.
As technology went, Eddie didn't think it was such of a
much-certainly not compared to Blaine the Mono, or the dipolar
computers that ran Lud-but it cast a pretty light over the crowd and
seemed to be non-toxic. He applauded with the rest. So did Susannah.
Andy had brought her wheelchair and unfolded it for her with a
compliment (he also offered to tell her about the handsome stranger she
would soon meet). Now she wheeled her way amongst the little knots of
people with a plate of food on her lap, chatting here, moving on,
chatting there and moving on again. Eddie guessed she'd been to her
share of cocktail parties not much different from this, and was a
little jealous of her aplomb.
Eddie began to notice children in the crowd. Apparenty the folken had
decided their visitors weren't going to just haul out their shooting
irons and start a massacre. The oldest kids were allowed to wander
about on their own. They traveled in the protective packs Eddie
recalled from his own childhood, scoring massive amounts of food from
the tables (although not even the appetites of voracious teenagers
could make much of a dent in that bounty). They watched the outlanders,
but none quite dared approach.
The youngest children stayed close to their parents. Those of the
painful 'tween age clustered around the slide, swings, and elaborate
monkey-bar construction at the very far end of the Pavilion. A few used
the stuff, but most of them only watched the party with the puzzled
eyes of those who are somehow caught just wrongways. Eddie's heart went
out to them. He could see how many pairs there were-it was
eerie-and guessed that it was these puzzled children, just a little
too old to use the playground equipment unselfconsciously, who would
give up the greatest number to the Wolves... if the Wolves were allowed
to do their usual thing, that was. He saw none of the "roont" ones, and
guessed they had deliberately been kept apart, lest they cast a pall on
the gathering. Eddie could understand that, but hoped they were having
a party of their own somewhere. (Later he found that this was exactly
the case- cookies and ice cream behind Callahan's church.)
Jake would have fit perfectly into the middle group of children, had he
been of the Calla, but of course he wasn't. And he'd made a friend who
suited him perfectly: older in years, younger in experience. They went
about from table to table, grazing at random. Oy trailed at Jake's
heels contentedly enough, head always swinging from side to side. Eddie
had no doubt whatever that if someone made an aggressive move toward
Jake of New York (or his new friend, Benny of the Calla), that fellow
would find himself missing a couple of fingers. At one point Eddie saw
the two boys look at each other, and although not a word passed between
them, they burst out laughing at exactly the same moment. And Eddie was
reminded so forcibly of his own childhood friendships that it hurt.
Not that Eddie was allowed much time for introspection. He knew from
Roland's stories (and from having seen him in action a couple of times)
that the gunslingers of Gilead had been much more than peace officers.
They had also been messengers, accountants, sometimes spies, once in
awhile even executioners. More than anything else, however, they had
been diplomats. Eddie, raised by his brother and his friends with such
nuggets of wisdom as Why can't you eat me like your sister does and I
fucked your mother and she sure was fine, not to mention the
ever-popular I don't shut up I grow up, and when I look at you I throw
up, would never have thought of himself a diplomat, but on the whole he
thought he handled himself pretty well. Only Telford was hard, and the
band shut him up, say thankya.
God knew it was a case of sink or swim; the Calla-folk might be
frightened of the Wolves, but they weren't shy when it came to asking
how Eddie and the others of his tet would handle them. Eddie realized
Roland had done him a very big favor, making him speak in front of the
entire bunch of them. It had warmed him up a little for this.
He told all of them the same things, over and over. It would be
impossible to talk strategy until they had gotten a good look at the
town. Impossible to tell how many men of the Calla would need to join
them. Time would show. They'd peek at daylight. There would be water
if God willed it. Plus every other cliche he could think of. (It even
crossed his mind to promise them a chicken in every pot after the
Wolves were vanquished, but he stayed his tongue before it could wag so
far.) A smallhold farmer named Jorge Estrada wanted to know what they'd
do if the Wolves decided to light the village on fire. Another, Garrett
Strong, wanted Eddie to tell them where the children would be kept safe
when the Wolves came. "For we can't leave em here, you must kennit very
well," he said. Eddie, who realized he kenned very little, sipped at
his graf and was noncommittal. A fellow named Neil Faraday (Eddie
couldn't tell if he was a smallhold farmer or just a hand) approached
and told Eddie this whole thing had gone too far. "They never take all
the children, you know," he said. Eddie thought of asking Faraday what
he'd make of someone who said, "Well, only two of them raped my wife,"
and decided to keep the comment to himself. A dark-skinned, mustached
fellow named Louis Haycox introduced himself and told Eddie he had
decided Tian Jaffords was right. He'd spent many sleepless nights since
the meeting, thinking it over, and had finally decided that he would
stand and fight. If they wanted him, that was. The combination of
sincerity and terror Eddie saw in the man's face touched him deeply.
This was no excited kid who didn't know what he was doing but a
full-grown man who probably knew all too well.
So here they came with their questions and there they went with no real
answers, but looking more satisfied even so. Eddie talked until his
mouth was dry, then exchanged his wooden cup of graf for cold tea, not
wanting to get drunk. He didn't want to eat any more, either; he was
stuffed. But still they came. Cash and Estrada. Strong and Echeverria.
Winkler and Spalter (cousins of Overholser's, they said). Freddy
Rosario and Farren Posella... or was it Freddy Posella and Farren
Rosario?
Every ten or fifteen minutes the torches would change color again. From
red to green, from green to orange, from orange to blue. The jugs of
graf circulated. The talk grew louder. So did the laughter. Eddie began
to hear more frequent cries of Yer-bugger and something that sounded
like Dive-down!, always followed by laughter.
He saw Roland speaking with an old man in a blue cloak. The old fellow
had the thickest, longest, whitest beard Eddie had ever seen outside of
a TV Bible epic. He spoke earnestly, looking up into Roland's
weatherbeaten face. Once he touched the gunslinger's arm, pulled it a
little. Roland listened, nodded, said nothing-not while Eddie was
watching him, anyway. But he's interested, Eddie thought. Oh yeah-old
long tall and ugly's hearing something that interests him a lot.
The musicians were trooping back to the bandstand when someone else
stepped up to Eddie. It was the fellow who had reminded him of Pa
Cartwright.
"George Telford," he said. "May you do well, Eddie of New York." He
gave his forehead a perfunctory tap with the side of his fist, then
opened the hand and held it out. He wore rancher's headgear-a cowboy
hat instead of a farmer's sombrero-but his palm felt remarkably soft,
except for a line of callus running along the base of his fingers.
That's where he holds the reins, Eddie thought, and when it comes to
work, that's probably it.
Eddie gave a little bow. "Long days and pleasant nights, sai Telford."
It crossed his mind to ask if Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe were back at
the Ponderosa, but he decided again to keep his wiseacre mouth shut.
"May'ee have twice the number, son, twice the number." He looked at the
gun on Eddie's hip, then up at Eddie's face. His eyes were shrewd and
not particularly friendly. "Your dinh wears the mate of that, I ken."
Eddie smiled, said nothing.
"Wayne Overholser says yer ka-babby put on quite a shooting exhibition
with another 'un. I believe yer wife's wearing it tonight?"
"I believe she is," Eddie said, not much caring for that ka-babby
thing. He knew very well that Susannah had the Ruger. Roland had
decided it would be better if Jake didn't go armed out to Eisenhart's
Rocking B.
"Four against forty'd be quite a pull, wouldn't you say?" Telford
asked. "Yar, a hard pull that'd be. Or mayhap there might be sixty come
in from the east; no one seems to remember for sure, and why would
they? Twenty-three years is a long time of peace, tell God aye and Man
Jesus thankya."
Eddie smiled and said a little more nothing, hoping Telford would move
along to another subject. Hoping Telford would go away, actually.
No such luck. Pissheads always hung around: it was almost a law of
nature. "Of course four armed against forty... or sixty... would be a
sight better than three armed and one standing by to raise a cheer.
Especially four armed with hard calibers, may you hear me."
"Hear you just fine," Eddie said. Over by the platform where they had
been introduced, Zalia Jaffords was telling Susannah something. Eddie
thought Suze also looked interested. She gets the farmer's wife, Roland
gets the Lord of the fuckin Rings, Jake gets to make a friend, and what
do I get? A guy who looks like Pa Cartwright and cross-examines like
Perry Mason.
"Do you have more guns?" Telford asked. "Surely you must have more, if
you think to make a stand against the Wolves. Myself, I think the
idea's madness; I've made no secret of it. Vaughn Eisenhart feels the
same-"
"Overholser felt that way and changed his mind," Eddie said in a
just-passing-the-time kind of way. He sipped tea and looked at Telford
over the rim of his cup, hoping for a frown. Maybe even a brief look of
exasperation. He got neither.
"Wayne the Weathervane," Telford said, and chuckled. "Yar, yar, swings
this way and that. Wouldn't be too sure of him yet, young sai."
Eddie thought of saying, If you think this is an election you better
think again, and then didn't. Mouth shut, see much, say little.
"Do'ee have speed-shooters, p'raps?" Telford asked. "Or grenados?"
"Oh well," Eddie said, "that's as may be."
" "I never heard of a woman gunslinger."
"No?"
"Or a boy, for that matter. Even a 'prentice. How are we to know you
are who you say you are? Tell me, I beg."
"Well, that's a hard one to answer," Eddie said. He had taken a strong
dislike to Telford, who looked too old to have children at risk.
"Yet people will want to know," Telford said. "Certainly before they
bring the storm."
Eddie remembered Roland's saying We may be cast on but no man may cast
us back. It was clear they didn't understand that yet. Certainly
Telford didn't. Of course there were questions that had to be answered,
and answered yes; Callahan had mentioned that and Roland had confirmed
it. Three of them. The first was something about aid and succor. Eddie
didn't think those questions had been asked yet, didn't see how they
could have been, but he didn't think they would be asked in the
Gathering Hall when the time came. The answers might be given by little
people like Posella and Rosario, who didn't even know what they were
saying. People who did have children at risk.
"Who are you really?" Telford asked. "Tell me, I beg."
"Eddie Dean, of New York. I hope you're not questioning my honesty. I
hope to Christ you're not doing that."
Telford took a step back, suddenly wary. Eddie was grimly glad to see
it. Fear wasn't better than respect, but by God it was better than
nothing. "Nay, not at all, my friend! Please! But tell me this-have
you ever used the gun you carry? Tell me, I beg."
Eddie saw that Telford, although nervous of him, didn't really believe
it. Perhaps there was still too much of the old Eddie Dean, the one who
really had been of New York, in his face and manner for this
rancher-sai to believe it, but Eddie didn't think that was it. Not the
bottom of it, anyway. Here was a fellow who'd made up his mind to stand
by and watch creatures from Thunderclap take the children of his
neighbors, and perhaps a man like that simply couldn't believe in the
simple, final answers a gun allowed. Eddie had come to know those
answers, however. Even to love them. He remembered their single
terrible day in Lud, racing Susannah in her wheelchair under a gray sky
while the god-drums pounded. He remembered Frank and Luster and Topsy
the Sailor; thought of a woman named Maud kneeling to kiss one of the
lunatics Eddie had shot to death. What had she said? You shouldn't've
shot Winston, for 'twas his birthday. Something like that.
"I've used this one and the other one and the Ruger as well," he said.
"And don't you ever speak to me that way again, my friend, as if the
two of us were on the inside of some funny joke."
"If I offended in any way, gunslinger, I cry your pardon."
Eddie relaxed a little. Gunslinger. At least the silver-haired son of a
bitch had the wit to say so even if he might not believe so.
The band produced another flourish. The leader slipped his guitar-strap
over his head and called, "Come on now, you all! That's enough food!
Time to dance it off and sweat it out, so it is!"
Cheers and yipping cries. There was also a rattle of explosions that
caused Eddie to drop his hand, as he had seen Roland drop his on a good
many occasions.
"Easy, my friend," Telford said. "Only little bangers. Children setting
off Reap-crackers, you ken."
"So it is," Eddie said. "Cry your pardon."
"No need." Telford smiled. It was a handsome Pa Cartwright smile, and
in it Eddie saw one thing clear: this man would never come over to
their side. Not that was, until and unless every Wolf out of
Thunderclap lay dead for the town's inspection in this very Pavilion.
And if that happened, he would claim to have been with them from the
very first.
EIGHT
The dancing went on until moonrise, and that night the moon showed
clear. Eddie took his turn with several ladies of the town. Twice he
waltzed with Susannah in his arms, and when they danced the squares,
she turned and crossed-allamand left, allamand right-in her
wheelchair with pretty precision. By the ever-changing light of the
torches, her face was damp and delighted. Roland also danced,
gracefully but (Eddie thought) with no real enjoyment or flair for it.
Certainly there was nothing in it to prepare them for what ended the
evening. Jake and Benny Slightman had wandered off on their own, but
once Eddie saw them kneeling beneath a tree and playing a game that
looked suspiciously like mumblety-peg.
When the dancing was done, there was singing. This began with the band
itself-a mournful love-ballad and then an uptempo number so deep in
the Calla's patois that Eddie couldn't follow the lyric. He didn't have
to in order to know it was at least mildly ribald; there were shouts
and laughter from the men and screams of glee from the ladies. Some of
the older ones covered their ears.
After these first two tunes, several people from the Calla mounted the
bandstand to sing. Eddie didn't think any of them would have gotten
very far on Star Search, but each was greeted warmly as they stepped to
the front of the band and were cheered lustily (and in the case of one
pretty young matron, lustfully) as they stepped down. Two girls of
about nine, obviously identical twins, sang a ballad called "Streets of
Campara" in perfect, aching harmony, accompanied by just a single
guitar which one of them played. Eddie was struck by the rapt silence
in which the folken listened. Although most of the men were now deep in
drink, not a single one of these broke the attentive quiet. No
baby-bangers went off. A good many (the one named Haycox among them)
listened with tears streaming down their faces. If asked earlier, Eddie
would have said of course he understood the emotional weight beneath
which this town was laboring. He hadn't. He knew that now.
When the song about the kidnapped woman and the dying cowboy ended,
there was a moment of utter silence-not even the nightbirds cried. It
was followed by wild applause. Eddie thought, If they showed hands on
what to do about the Wolves right now, not even Pa Cartwright would
dare vote to stand aside.
The girls curtsied and leaped nimbly down to the grass. Eddie thought
that would be it for the night, but then, to his surprise, Callahan
climbed on stage.
He said, "Here's an even sadder song my mother taught me" and then
launched into a cheerful Irish ditty called "Buy Me Another Round You
Booger You." It was at least as dirty as the one the band had played
earlier, but this time Eddie could understand most of the words. He and
the rest of the town gleefully joined in on the last line of every
verse: Before yez put me in the ground, buy me another round, you
booger you!
Susannah rolled her wheelchair over to the gazebo and was helped up
during the round of applause that followed the Old Fella's song. She
spoke briefly to the three guitarists and showed them something on the
neck of one of the instruments. They all nodded. Eddie guessed they
either knew the song or a version of it.
The crowd waited expectantly, none more so than the lady's husband. He
was delighted but not entirely surprised when she voyaged upon "Maid of
Constant Sorrow," which she had sometimes sung on the trail. Susannah
was no Joan Baez, but her voice was true, full of emotion. And why not?
It was the song of a woman who has left her home for a strange place.
When she finished, there was no silence, as after the little girls'
duet, but a round of honest, enthusiastic applause. There were cries of
Yar! and Again! and More staves! Susannah offered no more staves (for
she'd sung all the ones she knew) but gave them a deep curtsy, instead.
Eddie clapped until his hands hurt, then stuck his fingers in the
corners of his mouth and whistled.
And then-the wonders of this evening would never end, it
seemed-Roland himself was climbing up as Susannah was handed
carefully down.
Jake and his new pal were at Eddie's side. Benny Slightman was carrying
Oy. Until tonight Eddie would have said the bumbler would have bitten
anyone not of Jake's ka-tet who tried that.
"Can he sing?" Jake asked.
"News to me if he can, kiddo," Eddie said. "Let's see." He had no idea
what to expect, and was a little amused at how hard his heart was
thumping.
NINE
Roland removed his holstered gun and cartridge belt. He handed them
down to Susannah, who took them and strapped on the belt high at the
waist. The cloth of her shirt pulled tight when she did it, and for a
moment Eddie thought her breasts looked bigger. Then he dismissed it as
a trick of the light
The torches were orange. Roland stood in their light, gunless and as
slim-hipped as a boy. For a moment he only looked out over the silent,
watching faces, and Eddie felt Jake's hand, cold and small, creep into
his own. There was no need for the boy to say what he was thinking,
because Eddie was thinking it himself. Never had he seen a man who
looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship
and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta (for it was a
fiesta, no matter how desperate the business that lay behind it might
be), only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no
other. If Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy were of his line, they were
only a distant shoot, far from the trunk. Afterthoughts, almost.
Roland, however... Roland...
Hush, Eddie thought. You don't want to think about such things. Not
tonight.
Slowly, Roland crossed his arms over his chest, narrow and tight, so he
could lay the palm of his right hand on his left cheek and the palm of
his left hand on his right cheek. This meant zilch to Eddie, but the
reaction from the seven hundred or so Calla-folk was immediate: a
jubilant, approving roar that went far beyond mere applause. Eddie
remembered a Rolling Stones concert he'd been to. The crowd had made
that same sound when the Stones' drummer, Charlie Watts, began to tap
his cowbell in a syncopated rhythm that could only mean "Honky Tonk
Woman."
Roland stood as he was, arms crossed, palms on cheeks, until they
quieted. "We are well-met in the Calla," he said. "Hear me, I beg."
"We say thankee!" they roared. And "Hear you very well!"
Roland nodded and smiled. "But I and my friends have been far and we
have much yet to do and see. Now while we bide, will you open to us if
we open to you?"
Eddie felt a chill. He felt Jake's hand tighten on his own. It's the
first of the questions, he thought.
Before the thought was completed, they had roared their answer: "Aye,
and thankee!"
"Do you see us for what we are, and accept what we do?"
There goes the second one, Eddie thought, and now it was him squeezing
Jake's hand. He saw Telford and the one named Diego Adams exchange a
dismayed, knowing look. The look of men suddenly realizing that the
deal is going down right in front of them and they are helpless to do
anything about it. Too late, boys, Eddie thought.
"Gunslingers!" someone shouted. "Gunslingers fair and true, say
thankee! Say thankee in God's name!"
Roars of approval. A thunder of shouts and applause. Cries of thankee
and aye and even yer-bugger.
As they quieted, Eddie waited for him to ask the last question, the
most important one: Do you seek aid and succor?
Roland didn't ask it. He said merely, "We'd go our way for tonight, and
put down our heads, for we're tired. But I'd give'ee one final song and
a little step-toe before we leave, so I would, for I believe you know
both."
A jubilant roar of agreement met this. They knew it, all right.
"I know it myself, and love it," said Roland of Gilead. "I know it of
old, and never expected to hear 'The Rice Song' again from any lips,
least of all from my own. I am older now, so I am, and not so limber as
I once was. Cry your pardon for the steps I get wrong-"
"Gunslinger, we say thankee!" a woman called. "Such joy we feel, aye!"
"And do I not feel the same?" the gunslinger asked gently. "Do I not
give you joy from my joy, and water I carried with the strength of my
arm and my heart?"
"Give you to eat of the green-crop," they chanted as one, and Eddie
felt his back prickle and his eyes tear up.
"Oh my God," Jake sighed. "He knows so much..."
"Give you joy of the rice," Roland said.
He stood for a moment longer in the orange glow, as if gathering his
strength, and then he began to dance something that was caught between
a jig and a tap routine. It was slow at first, very slow, heel and toe,
heel and toe. Again and again his bootheels made that fist-on-coffintop
sound, but now it had rhythm. Just rhythm at first, and then, as the
gunslinger's feet began to pick up speed, it was more than rhythm: it
became a kind of jive. That was the only word Eddie could think of, the
only one that seemed to fit.
Susannah rolled up to them. Her eyes were huge, her smile amazed. She
clasped her hands tightly between her breasts. "Oh, Eddie!" she
breathed. "Did you know he could do this? Did you have any slightest
idea?"
"No," Eddie said. "No idea."
TEN
Faster moved the gunslinger's feet in their battered and broken old
boots. Then faster still. The rhythm becoming clearer and clearer, and
Jake suddenly realized he knew that beat. Knew it from the first time
he'd gone todash in New York. Before meeting Eddie, a young black man
with Walkman earphones on his head had strolled past him, bopping his
sandaled feet and going "Cha-da-ba, cha-da-fow!" under his breath. And
that was the rhythm Roland was beating out on the bandstand, each Bow!
accomplished by a forward kick of the leg and a hard skip of the heel
on wood.
Around them, people began to clap. Not on the beat, but on the
off-beat. They were starting to sway. Those women wearing skirts held
them out and swirled them. The expression Jake saw on all the faces,
oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought,
and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some
books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Sweat began to gleam on Roland's face. He lowered his crossed arms and
started clapping. When he did, the Calla-folken began to chant one word
over and over on the beat: "Come!... Come!... Come!... Come! It
occurred to Jake that this was the word some kids used for jizz, and he
suddenly doubted if that was mere coincidence.
Of course it's not. Like the black guy bopping to that same beat. It's
all the Beam, and it's all nineteen.
"Come!... Come!... Come!"
Eddie and Susannah had joined in. Benny had joined in. Jake abandoned
thought and did the same.
ELEVEN
In the end, Eddie had no real idea what the words to "The Rice Song"
might have been. Not because of the dialect, not in Roland's case, but
because they spilled out too fast to follow. Once, on TV, he'd heard a
tobacco auctioneer in South Carolina. This was like that. There were
hard rhymes, soft rhymes, off-rhymes, even rape-rhymes-words that
didn't rhyme at all but were forced to for a moment within the borders
of the song. It wasn't a song, not really; it was like a chant, or some
delirious streetcorner hip-hop. That was the closest Eddie could come.
And all the while, Roland's feet pounded out their entrancing rhythm on
the boards; all the while the crowd clapped and chanted Come, come,
come, come.
What Eddie could pick out went like this:
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla
I-sissa 'ay a-bralla
Dey come a-folla
Down come a-rivva
Or-i-za we kivva
Rice be a green-o
See all we seen-o
Seen-o the green-o
Come-come-commala!
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla
Deep inna walla
Grass come-commala
Under the sky-o
Grass green n high-o
Girl n her fella
Lie down togetha
They slippy 'ay slide-o
Under 'ay sky-o
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla!
At least three more verses followed these two. By then Eddie had lost
track of the words, but he was pretty sure he got the idea: a young man
and woman, planting both rice and children in the spring of the year.
The song's tempo, suicidally speedy to begin with, sped up and up until
the words were nothing but a jargon-spew and the crowd was clapping so
rapidly their hands were a blur. And the heels of Roland's boots had
disappeared entirely. Eddie would have said it was impossible for
anyone to dance at that speed, especially after having consumed a heavy
meal.
Slow down, Roland, he thought. It's not like we can call 911 if you
vapor-lock.
Then, on some signal neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake understood,
Roland and the Calla-folken stopped in mid-career, threw their hands to
the sky, and thrust their hips forward, as if in coitus. "COMMALA!"
they shouted, and that was the end.
Roland swayed, sweat pouring down his cheeks and brow... and tumbled
off the stage into the crowd. Eddie's heart took a sharp upward lurch
in his chest. Susannah cried out and began to roll her wheelchair
forward. Jake stopped her before she could get far, grabbing one of the
push-handles.
"I think it's part of the show!" he said.
"Yar, I'm pretty sure it is, too," Benny Slightman said.
The crowd cheered and applauded. Roland was conveyed through them and
above them by willing upraised arms. His own arms were raised to the
stars. His chest heaved like a bellows. Eddie watched in a kind of
hilarious disbelief as the gunslinger rolled toward them as if on the
crest of a wave.
"Roland sings, Roland dances, and to top it all off," he said, "Roland
stage-dives like Joey Ramone."
"What are you talking about, sugar?" Susannah asked.
Eddie shook his head. "Doesn't matter. But nothing can top that. It's
got to be the end of the party."
It was.
TWELVE
Half an hour later, four riders moved slowly down the high street of
Calla Bryn Sturgis. One was wrapped in a heavy salide. Frosty plumes
came from their mouths and those of their mounts on each exhale. The
sky was filled with a cold strew of diamond-chips, Old Star and Old
Mother brightest among them. Jake had already gone his way with the
Slightmans to Eisenhart's Rocking B. Callahan led the other three
travelers, riding a bit ahead of them. But before leading them
anywhere, he insisted on wrapping Roland in the heavy blanket.
"You say it's not even a mile to your place-" Roland began.
"Never mind your blather," Callahan said. "The clouds have rolled away,
the night's turned nigh-on cold enough to snow, and you danced a
commala such as I've never seen in my years here."
"How many years would that be?" Roland asked.
Callahan shook his head. "I don't know. Truly, gunslinger, I don't. I
know well enough when I came here-that was the winter of 1983, nine
years after I left the town of Jerusalem's Lot. Nine years after I got
this." He raised his scarred hand briefly.
"Looks like a burn," Eddie remarked.
Callahan nodded, but said no more on the subject. "In any case, time
over here is different, as you all must very well know."
"It's in drift," Susannah said. "Like the points of the compass."
Roland, already wrapped in the blanket, had seen Jake off with a
word... and with something else, as well. Eddie heard the clink of
metal as something passed from the hand of the gunslinger to that of
the 'prentice. A bit of money, perhaps.
Jake and Benny Slightman rode off into the dark side by side. When Jake
turned and offered a final wave, Eddie had returned it with a
surprising pang. Christ, you're not his father, he thought. That was
true, but it didn't make the pang go away.
"Will he be all right, Roland?" Eddie had expected no other answer but
yes, had wanted nothing more than a bit of balm for that pang. So the
gunslinger's long silence alarmed him.
At long last Roland replied, "We'll hope so." And on the subject of
Jake Chambers, he would say no more.
THIRTEEN
Now here was Callahan's church, a low and simple log building with a
cross mounted over the door.
"What name do you call it, Pere?" Roland asked.
"Our Lady of Serenity."
Roland nodded. "Good enough."
"Do you feel it?" Callahan asked. "Do any of you feel it?" He didn't
have to say what he was talking about.
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah sat quietly for perhaps an entire minute.
At last Roland shook his head.
Callahan nodded, satisfied. "It sleeps." He paused, then added: "Tell
God thankya."
"Something's there, though," Eddie said. He nodded toward the church.
"It's like a... I don't know, a weight, almost."
"Yes," Callahan said. "Like a weight. It's awful. But tonight it
sleeps. God be thanked." He sketched a cross in the frosty air.
Down a plain dirt track (but smooth, and bordered with carefully tended
hedges) was another log building. Callahan's house, what he called the
rectory.
"Will you tell us your story tonight?" Roland said.
Callahan glanced at the gunslinger's thin, exhausted face and shook his
head. "Not a word of it, sai. Not even if you were fresh. Mine is no
story for starlight. Tomorrow at breakfast, before you and your friends
are off on your errands-would that suit?"
"Aye," Roland said.
"What if it wakes up in the night?" Susannah asked, and cocked her head
toward the church. "Wakes up and sends us todash?"
"Then we'll go," Roland said.
"You've got an idea what to do with it, don't you?" Eddie asked.
"Perhaps," Roland said. They started down the path to the house,
including Callahan among them as naturally as breathing.
"Anything to do with that old Manni guy you were talking to?" Eddie
asked.
"Perhaps," Roland repeated. He looked at Callahan. "Tell me, Pere, has
it ever sent you todash? You know the word, don't you?"
"I know it," Callahan said. "Twice. Once to Mexico. A little town
called Los Zapatos. And once... I think... to the Castle of the King. I
believe that I was very lucky to get back, that second time."
"What King are you talking about?" Susannah asked. "Arthur Eld?"
Callahan shook his head. The scar on his forehead glared in the
starlight. "Best not to talk about it now," he said. "Not at night." He
looked at Eddie sadly. "The Wolves are coming. Bad enough. Now comes a
young man who tells me the Red Sox lost the World Series again... to
the Mets?"
"Afraid so," Eddie said, and his description of the final game-a game
that made little sense to Roland, although it sounded a bit like
Points, called Wickets by some-carried them up to the house. Callahan
had a housekeeper. She was not in evidence but had left a pot of hot
chocolate on the hob.
While they drank it, Susannah said: "Zalia Jaffords told me something
that might interest you, Roland."
The gunslinger raised his eyebrows.
"Her husband's grandfadier lives with them. He's reputed to be the
oldest man in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Tian and the old man haven't been on
good terms in years-Zalia isn't even sure what they're pissed off
about, it's that old-but Zalia gets on with him very well. She says
he's gotten quite senile over the last couple of years, but he still
has his bright days. And he claims to have seen one of these Wolves.
Dead." She paused. "He claims to have killed it himself."
"My soul!" Callahan exclaimed. "You don't say so!"
"I do. Or rather, Zalia did."
"That," Roland said, "would be a tale worth hearing. Was it the last
time the Wolves came?"
"No," Susannah said. "And not the time before, when even Overholser
would have been not long out of his clouts. The time before that."
"If they come every twenty-three years," Eddie said, "that's almost
seventy years ago."
Susannah nodded. "But he was a man grown, even then. He told Zalia that
a moit of them stood out on the West Road and waited for the Wolves to
come. I don't know how many a moit might be-"
"Five or six," Roland said. He was nodding over his chocolate.
"Anyway, Tian's Gran-pere was among them. And they killed one of the
Wolves."
"What was it?" Eddie asked. "What did it look like with its mask off?"
"She didn't say," Susannah replied. "I don't think he told her. But we
ought to-"
A snore arose, long and deep. Eddie and Susannah turned, startled. The
gunslinger had fallen asleep. His chin was on his breastbone. His arms
were crossed, as if he'd drifted off to sleep still thinking of the
dance. And the rice.
FOURTEEN
There was only one extra bedroom, so Roland bunked in with Callahan.
Eddie and Susannah were thus afforded a sort of rough honeymoon: their
first night together by themselves, in a bed and under a roof. They
were not too tired to take advantage of it. Afterward, Susannah passed
immediately into sleep. Eddie lay awake a litde while. Hesitantly, he
sent his mind out in the direction of Callahan's tidy little church,
trying to touch the thing that lay within. Probably a bad idea, but he
couldn't resist at least trying. There was nothng. Or rather, a nothing
in front of a something.
/ could wake it up, Eddie diought. I really think I could.
Yes, and someone with an infected tooth could rap it with a hammer, but
why would you?
We'll have to wake it up eventually. I think we're going to need it.
Perhaps, but that was for another day. It was time to let this one go.
Yet for awhile Eddie was incapable of doing that. Images flashed in his
mind, like bits of broken mirror in bright sunlight. The Calla, lying
spread out below them beneath the cloudy sky, the Devar-Tete Whye a
gray ribbon. The green beds at its edge: rice come a-falla. Jake and
Benny Slightman looking at each other and laughing without a word
passed between them to account for it. The aisle of green grass between
the high street and the Pavilion. The torches changing color. Oy,
bowing and speaking (Eld! Thankee!) with perfect clarity. Susannah
singing: "I've known sorrow all my days."
Yet what he remembered most clearly was Roland standing slim and
gunless on the boards with his arms crossed at the chest and his hands
pressed against his cheeks; those faded blue eyes looking out at the
folken. Roland asking questions, two of three. And then the sound of
his boots on the boards, slow at first, then speeding up. Faster and
faster, until they were a blur in the torchlight. Clapping. Sweating.
Smiling. Yet his eyes didn't smile, not those blue bombardier's eyes;
they were as cold as ever.
Yet how he had danced! Great God, how he had danced in the light of the
torches.
Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla, Eddie thought.
Beside him, Susannah moaned in some dream.
Eddie turned to her. Slipped his hand beneath her arm so he could cup
her breast His last thought was for Jake. They had better take care of
him out at that ranch. If they didn't, they were going to be one
sorry-ass bunch of cowpunchers.
Eddie slept. There were no dreams. And beneath them as the night
latened and die moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying
clock.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 25 Feb 2005 00:30:30 -0800
--------
Chapter II: Dry Twist
ONE
Roland awoke from another vile dream of Jericho Hill in the hour before
dawn. The horn. Something about Arthur Eld's horn. Beside him in the
big bed, the Old Fella slept with a frown on his face, as if caught in
his own bad dream. It creased his broad brow zigzag, breaking the arms
of the cross scarred into the skin there.
It was pain that had wakened Roland, not his dream of the horn spilling
from Cuthbert's hand as his old friend fell. The gunslinger was caught
in a vise of it from the hips all the way down to his ankles. He could
visualize the pain as a series of bright and burning rings. This was
how he paid for his outrageous exertions of the night before. If that
was all, all would have been well, but he knew there was more to this
than just having danced the commala a little too enthusiastically. Nor
was it the rheumatiz, as he had been telling himself these last few
weeks, his body's necessary period of adjustment to the damp weather of
this fall season. He was not blind to the way his ankles, especially
the right one, had begun to thicken. He had observed a similar
thickening of his knees, and although his hips still looked fine, when
he placed his hands on them, he could feel the way the right one was
changing under the skin. No, not the rheumatiz that had afflicted Cort
so miserably in his last year or so, keeping him inside by his fire on
rainy days. This was something worse. It was arthritis, the bad kind,
the dry kind. It wouldn't be long before it reached his hands. Roland
would gladly have fed his right one to the disease, if that would have
satisfied it; he had taught it to do a good many things since the
lobstrosities had taken the first two fingers, but it was never going
to be what it was. Only ailments didn't work that way, did they? You
couldn't placate them with sacrifices. The arthritis would come when it
came and go where it wanted to go.
I might have a year, he thought, lying in bed beside the sleeping
religious from Eddie and Susannah and Jake's world. I might even have
two.
No, not two. Probably not even one. What was it Eddie sometimes said?
Quit kidding yourself. Eddie had a lot of sayings from his world, but
that was a particularly good one. A particularly apt one.
Not that he would cry off the Tower if Old Bone-Twist Man took his
ability to shoot, saddle a horse, cut a strip of rawhide, even to chop
wood for a campfire, so simple a thing as that; no, he was in it until
the end. But he didn't relish the picture of riding along behind the
others, dependent upon them, perhaps tied to his saddle with the reins
because he could no longer hold the pommel. Nothing but a drag-anchor.
One they wouldn't be able to pull up if and when fast sailing was
required.
If it gets to that, I'll kill myself.
But he wouldn't. That was the truth. Quit kidding yourself.
Which brought Eddie to mind again. He needed to talk to Eddie about
Susannah, and right away. This was the knowledge with which he had
awakened, and perhaps worth the pain. It wouldn't be a pleasant talk,
but it had to be done. It was time Eddie knew about Mia. She would find
it more difficult to slip away now that they were in a town-in a
house-but she would have to, just the same. She could argue with her
baby's needs and her own cravings no more than Roland could argue with
the bright rings of pain which circled his right hip and knee and both
ankles but had so far spared his talented hands. If Eddie wasn't
warned, there might be terrible trouble. More trouble was something
they didn't need now; it might sink them.
Roland lay in the bed, and throbbed, and watched the sky lighten. He
was dismayed to see that brightness no longer bloomed dead east; it was
a little off to the south, now.
Sunrise was also in drift.
TWO
The housekeeper was good-looking, about forty. Her name was Rosalita
Munoz, and when she saw the way Roland walked to the table, she said:
"One cup coffee, then you come with me."
Callahan cocked his head at Roland when she went to the stove to get
the pot. Eddie and Susannah weren't up yet. The two of them had the
kitchen to themselves. "How bad is it with you, sir?"
"It's only the rheumatiz," Roland said. "Goes through all my family on
my father's side. It'll work out by noon, given bright sunshine and dry
air."
"I know about the rheumatiz," Callahan said. "Tell God thankya it's no
worse."
"I do." And to Rosalita, who brought heavy mugs of steaming coffee. "I
tell you thankya, as well."
She put down the cups, curtsied, and then regarded him shyly and
gravely. "I never saw the rice-dance kicked better, sai."
Roland smiled crookedly. "I'm paying for it this morning."
"I'll fix you," she said. "I've a cat-oil, special to me. It'll first
take the pain and then the limp. Ask Pere."
Roland looked at Callahan, who nodded.
"Then I'll take you up on it. Thankee-sai."
She curtsied again, and left them.
"I need a map of the Calla," Roland said when she was gone. "It doesn't
have to be great art, but it has to be accurate, and true as to
distance. Can you draw one for me?"
"Not at all," Callahan said composedly. "I cartoon a little, but I
couldn't draw you a map that would take you as far as the river, not
even if you put a gun to my head. It's just not a talent I have. But I
know two that could help you there." He raised his voice. "Rosalita!
Rosie! Come to me a minute, do ya!"
THREE
Twenty minutes later, Rosalita took Roland by the hand, her grip firm
and dry. She led him into the pantry and closed the door. "Drop yer
britches, I beg," she said. "Be not shy, for I doubt you've anything I
haven't seen before, unless men are built summat different in Gilead
and the Inners."
"I don't believe they are," Roland said, and let his pants fall.
The sun was now up but Eddie and Susannah were still down. Roland was
in no hurry to wake them. There would be plenty of early days
ahead-and late evenings, too, likely-but this morning let them
enjoy the peace of a roof over their heads, the comfort of a feather
mattress beneath their bodies, and the exquisite privacy afforded by a
door between their secret selves and the rest of the world.
Rosalita, a bottle of pale, oily liquid in one hand, drew in a hiss
over her full lower lip. She looked at Roland's right knee, then
touched his right hip with her left hand. He flinched away a bit from
the touch, although it was gentleness itself.
She raised her eyes to him. They were so dark a brown they were almost
black. "This isn't rheumatiz. It's arthritis. The kind that spreads
fast."
"Aye, where I come from some call it dry twist," he said. "Not a word
of it to the Pere, or to my friends."
Those dark eyes regarded him steadily. "You won't be able to keep this
a secret for long."
"I hear you very well. Yet while I can keep the secret, I will keep the
secret. And you'll help me."
"Aye," she said. "No fear. I'll bide'ee."
"Say thankya. Now, will that help me?"
She looked at the bottle and smiled. "Aye. It's mint and spriggum from
the swamp. But the secret's the cat's bile that's in it-not but three
drops in each bottle, ye ken. They're the rock-cats that come in out of
the desert, from the direction of the great darkness." She tipped up
the bottle and poured a little of the oily stuff into her palm. The
smell of the mint struck Roland's nose at once, followed by some other
smell, a lower smell, which was far less pleasant. Yes, he reckoned
that could be the bile of a puma or a cougar or whatever they meant by
a rock-cat in these parts.
When she bent and rubbed it into his kneecaps, the heat was immediate
and intense, almost too strong to bear. But when it moderated a bit,
there was more relief than he would have dared hope for.
When she had finished anointing him, she said: "How be your body now,
gunslinger-sai?"
Instead of answering with his mouth, he crushed her against his lean,
undressed body and hugged her tightly. She hugged him back with an
artless lack of shame and whispered in his ear, "If 'ee are who 'ee say
'ee are, 'ee mustn't let un take the babbies. No, not a single one.
Never mind what the big bugs like Eisenhart and Telford might say."
"We'll do the best we can," he said.
"Good. Thankya." She stepped back, looked down. "One part of 'ee has no
arthritis, nor rheumatiz, either. Looks quite lively. Perhaps a lady
might look at the moon tonight, gunslinger, and pine for company."
"Perhaps she'll find it," Roland said. "Will you give me a bottle of
that stuff to take on my travels around the Calla, or is it too dear?"
"Nay, not too dear," she said. In her flirting, she had smiled. Now she
looked grave again. "But will only help'ee a little while, I think."
"I know," Roland said. "And no matter. We spread the time as we can,
but in the end the world takes it all back."
"Aye," she said. "So it does."
FOUR
When he came out of the pantry, buckling his belt, he finally heard
stirring in the other room. The murmur of Eddie's voice followed by a
sleepy peal of female laughter. Callahan was at the stove, pouring
himself fresh coffee. Roland went to him and spoke rapidly.
"I saw pokeberries on the left of your drive between here and your
church."
"Yes, and they're ripe. Your eyes are sharp."
"Never mind my eyes, do ya. I would go out to pick my hat full. I'd
have Eddie join me while his wife perhaps cracks an egg or three. Can
you manage that?"
"I believe so, but-"
"Good," Roland said, and went out.
FIVE
By the time Eddie came, Roland had already half-filled his hat with the
orange berries, and also eaten several good handfuls. The pain in his
legs and hips had faded with amazing rapidity. As he picked, he
wondered how much Cort would have paid for a single bottle of Rosalita
Munoz's cat-oil.
"Man, those look like the wax fruit our mother used to put out on a
doily every Thanksgiving," Eddie said. "Can you really eat them?"
Roland picked a pokeberry almost as big as the tip of his own finger
and popped it into Eddie's mouth. "Does that taste like wax, Eddie?"
Eddie's eyes, cautious to begin with, suddenly widened. He swallowed,
grinned, and reached for more. "Like cranberries, only sweeter. I
wonder if Suze knows how to make muffins? Even if she doesn't, I bet
Callahan's housekeeper-"
"Listen to me, Eddie. Listen closely and keep a rein on your emotions.
For your father's sake."
Eddie had been reaching for a bush that was particularly heavy with
pokeberries. Now he stopped and simply looked at Roland, his face
expressionless. In this early light, Roland could see how much older
Eddie looked. How much he had grown up was really extraordinary.
"What is it?"
Roland, who had held this secret in his own counsel until it seemed
more complex than it really was, was surprised at how quickly and
simply it was told. And Eddie, he saw, wasn't completely surprised.
"How long have you known?"
Roland listened for accusation in this question and heard none. "For
certain? Since I first saw her slip into the woods. Saw her eating..."
Roland paused. "... what she was eating. Heard her speaking with people
who weren't there. I've suspected much longer. Since Lud."
"And didn't tell me."
"No." Now the recriminations would come, and a generous helping of
Eddie's sarcasm. Except they didn't.
"You want to know if I'm pissed, don't you? If I'm going to make this a
problem."
"Are you?"
"No. I'm not angry, Roland. Exasperated, maybe, and I'm scared to
fuckin death for Suze, but why would I be angry with you? Aren't you
the dinh?" It was Eddie's turn to pause. When he spoke again, he was
more specific. It wasn't easy for him, but he got it out. "Aren't you
my dinh?"
"Yes," Roland said. He reached out and touched Eddie's arm. He was
astounded by his desire-almost his need-to explain. He resisted it.
If Eddie could call him not just dinh but his dinh, he ought to behave
as dinh. What he said was, "You don't seem exactly stunned by my news."
"Oh, I'm surprised," Eddie said. "Maybe not stunned, but... well..." He
picked berries and dropped them into Roland's hat. "I saw some things,
okay? Sometimes she's too pale. Sometimes she winces and grabs at
herself, but if you ask her, she says it's just gas. And her boobs are
bigger. I'm sure of it. But Roland, she's still having her period! A
month or so ago I saw her burying the rags, and they were bloody.
Soaked. How can that be? If she caught pregnant when we pulled Jake
through-while she was keeping the demon of the circle
occupied-that's got to be four months at least, and probably five.
Even allowing for the way time slips around now, it's gotta be."
Roland nodded. "I know she's been having her monthlies. And that's
proof conclusive it isn't your baby. The thing she's carrying scorns
her woman's blood." Roland thought of her squeezing the frog in her
fist, popping it. Drinking its black bile. Licking it from her fingers
like syrup.
"Would it..." Eddie made as if to eat one of the pokeberries, decided
against it, and tossed it into Roland's hat instead. Roland thought it
would be a while before Eddie felt the stirrings of true appetite
again. "Roland, would it even look like a human baby?"
"Almost surely not."
"What, then?"
And before he could stay them, the words were out. "Better not to name
the devil."
Eddie winced. What little color remained in his face now left it.
"Eddie? Are you all right?"
"No," Eddie said. "I am most certainly not all right. But I'm not gonna
faint like a girl at an Andy Gibb concert, either. What are we going to
do?"
"For the time being, nothing. We have too many other things to do."
"Don't we just," Eddie said. "Over here, the Wolves come in twenty-four
days, if I've got it figured right. Over there in New York, who knows
what day it is? The sixth of June? The tenth? Closer to July fifteenth
than it was yesterday, that's for sure. But Roland-if what she's got
inside her isn't human, we can't be sure her pregnancy will go nine
months. She might pop it in six. Hell, she might pop it tomorrow."
Roland nodded and waited. Eddie had gotten this far; surely he would
make it the rest of the way.
And he did. "We're stuck, aren't we?"
"Yes. We can watch her, but there's not much else we can do. We can't
even keep her still in hopes of slowing things down, because she'd very
likely guess why we were doing it. And we need her. To shoot when the
time comes, but before that, we'll have to train some of these people
with whatever weapons they feel comfortable with. It'll probably turn
out to be bows." Roland grimaced. In the end he had hit the target in
the North Field with enough arrows to satisfy Cort, but he had never
cared for bow and arrow or bah and bolt. Those had been Jamie DeCurry's
choice of weapons, not his own.
"We're really gonna go for it, aren't we?"
"Oh yes."
And Eddie smiled. Smiled in spite of himself. He was what he was.
Roland saw it and was glad.
SIX
As they walked back to Callahan's rectory-house, Eddie asked: "You came
clean with me, Roland, why not come clean widi her?"
"I'm not sure I understand you."
"Oh, I think you do," Eddie said.
"All right, but you won't like the answer."
"I've heard all sorts of answers from you, and I couldn't say I've
cared for much more than one in five." Eddie considered. "Nah, that's
too generous. Make it one in fifty."
"The one who calls herself Mia-which means mother in the High
Speech-kens she's carrying a child, although I doubt she kens what
kind of a child."
Eddie considered this in silence.
"Whatever it is, Mia thinks of it as her baby, and she'll protect it to
the limit of her strength and life. If that means taking over
Susannah's body-the way Detta Walker sometimes took over Odetta
Holmes-she'll do it if she can."
"And probably she could," Eddie said gloomily. Then he turned directly
to Roland. "So what I think you're saying- correct me if I've got it
wrong-is that you don't want to tell Suze she might be growing a
monster in her belly because it might impair her efficiency."
Roland could have quibbled about the harshness of this judgment, but
chose not to. Essentially, Eddie was right.
As always when he was angry, Eddie's street accent became more
pronounced. It was almost as though he were speaking through his nose
instead of his mouth. "And if anything changes over the next month or
so-if she goes into labor and pops out the Creature from the Black
Lagoon, for instance-she's gonna be completely unprepared. Won't have
a clue."
Roland stopped about twenty feet from the rectory-house. Inside the
window, he could see Callahan talking to a couple of young people, a
boy and a girl. Even from here he could see they were twins.
"Roland?"
"You say true, Eddie. Is there a point? If so, I hope you'll get to it.
Time is no longer just a face on the water, as you yourself pointed
out. It's become a precious commodity."
Again he expected a patented Eddie Dean outburst complete with phrases
such as kiss my ass or eat shit and die. Again, no such outburst came.
Eddie was looking at him, that was all. Steadily and a little
sorrowfully. Sorry for Susannah, of course, but also for the two of
them. The two of them standing here and conspiring against one of the
tet.
"I'm going to go along with you," Eddie said, "but not because you're
the dinh, and not because one of those two is apt to come back
brainless from Thunderclap." He pointed to the pair of kids the Old
Fella was talking to in his living room. "I'd trade every kid in this
town for the one Suze is carrying. If it was a kid. My kid."
"I know you would," Roland said.
"It's the rose I care about," Eddie said. "That's the only thing worth
risking her for. But even so, you've got to promise me that if things
go wrong-if she goes into labor, or if this Mia chick starts taking
over-we'll try to save her."
"I would always try to save her," Roland said, and then had a brief,
nightmare image-brief but very clear-of Jake dangling over die drop
under the mountains.
"You swear that?" Eddie asked.
"Yes," Roland said. His eyes met those of the younger man. In his mind,
however, he saw Jake falling into the abyss.
SEVEN
They reached the rectory door just as Callahan was ushering the two
young people out. They were, Roland thought, very likely the most
gorgeous children he had ever seen. Their hair was black as coal, the
boy's shoulder-length, the girl's bound by a white ribbon and falling
all the way to her bottom. Their eyes were dark, perfect blue. Their
skin was creamy-pale, their lips a startling, sensuous red. There were
faint spatters of freckles on their cheeks. So far as Roland could
tell, the spatters were also identical. They looked from him to Eddie
and then back to Susannah, who leaned in the kitchen doorway with a
dish-wiper in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Their shared
expression was one of curious wonder. He saw caution in their faces,
but no fear.
"Roland, Eddie, I'd like you to meet the Tavery twins, Frank and
Francine. Rosalita fetched them-the Taverys live not half a mile
away, do ya. You'll have your map by this afternoon, and I doubt if
you'll ever have seen a finer one in all your life. It's but one of the
talents they have."
The Tavery twins made their manners, Frank with a bow and Francine with
a curtsy.
"You do us well and we say thankya," Roland told them.
An identical blush suffused their astoundingly creamy complexions; they
muttered their thanks and prepared to slip away. Before they could,
Roland put an arm around each narrow but well-made pair of shoulders
and led the twins a little way down the walk. He was taken less by
their perfect child's beauty than by the piercing intelligence he saw
in their blue eyes. He had no doubt they would make his map; he also
had no doubt that Callahan had had Rosalita fetch them as a kind of
object lesson, were one still needed: with no interference, one of
these beautiful children would be a grizzling idiot a month from now.
"Sai?" Frank asked. Now there was a touch of worry in his voice.
"Fear me not," Roland said, "but hear me well."
EIGHT
Callahan and Eddie watched Roland walk the Tavery twins slowly along
the rectory's flagstoned path and toward the dirt drive. Both men
shared the same thought: Roland looked like a benevolent gran-pere.
Susannah joined them, watched, then plucked Eddie's shirt. "Come with
me a minute."
He followed her into the kitchen. Rosalita was gone and they had it to
themselves. Susannah's brown eyes were enormous, shining.
"What is it?" he asked her.
"Pick me up."
He did.
"Now kiss me quick, while you have the chance."
"Is that all you want?"
"Isn't it enough? It better be, Mister Dean."
He kissed her, and willingly, but couldn't help marking how much larger
her breasts were as they pressed against him. When he drew his face
away from hers, he found himself looking for traces of the other one in
her face. The one who called herself Mother in the High Speech, He saw
only Susannah, but he supposed that from now on he would be condemned
to look. And his eyes kept trying to go to her belly. He tried to keep
them away, but it was as if they were weighted. He wondered how much
that was between them would change now. It was not a pleasant
speculation.
"Is that better?" he asked.
"Much." She smiled a little, and then the smile faded. "Eddie? Is
something wrong?"
He grinned and kissed her again. "You mean other than that we're all
probably gonna die here? Nope. Nothing at all."
Had he lied to her before? He couldn't remember, but he didn't think
so. And even if he had, he had never done so with such baldness. With
such calculation.
This was bad.
NINE
Ten minutes later, rearmed with fresh mugs of coffee (and a bowl of
pokeberries), they went out into the rectory's small back yard. The
gunslinger lifted his face into the sun for a moment, relishing its
weight and heat. Then he turned to Callahan. "We three would hear your
story now, Pere, if you'd tell it. And then mayhap stroll up to your
church and see what's there."
"I want you to take it," Callahan said. "It hasn't desecrated the
church, how could it when Our Lady was never consecrated to begin with?
But it's changed it for the worse. Even when the church was still a
building, I felt the spirit of God inside it. No more. That thing has
driven it out. I want you to take it."
Roland opened his mouth to say something noncommittal, but Susannah
spoke before he could. "Roland? You all right?"
He turned to her. "Why, yes. Why would I not be?"
"You keep rubbing your hip."
Had he been? Yes, he saw, he had. The pain was creeping back already,
in spite of the warm sun, in spite of Rosalita's cat-oil. The dry
twist.
"It's nothing," he told her. "Just a touch of the rheumatiz."
She looked at him doubtfully, then seemed to accept. This is a hell of
a way to start, Roland thought, with at least two of us keeping
secrets. We can't go on so. Not for long.
He turned to Callahan. "Tell us your tale. How you came by your scars,
how you came here, and how you came by Black Thirteen. We would hear
every word."
"Yes," Eddie murmured.
"Every word," Susannah echoed.
All three of them looked at Callahan-the Old Fella, the religious who
would allow himself to be called Pere but not priest. His twisted right
hand went to the scar on his forehead and rubbed at it. At last he
said: " 'Twas the drink. That's what I believe now. Not God, not
devils, not predestination, not the company of saints. 'Twas the
drink." He paused, thinking, then smiled at them. Roland remembered
Nort, the weed-eater in Tull who had been brought back from the dead by
the man in black. Nort had smiled like that. "But if God made the
world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will."
Ka, Roland thought.
Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead,
gathering his thoughts. And then he began to tell his story.
Correspondent:: "~Erissa~"
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:39:12 GMT
--------
On 23 Feb 2005, quit lovin' on the Buttmonkey of Paradise and said:
Ya'll better get loaded up on snacks if you're following this thread. The
book the poster is typing out of is the second longest in all seven of the
Dark Tower Books... We are talking almost two inches thick. The only one
thicker is the Seventh book..
--
"There are plenty of ways to see blood that don't involve Buzzards nuts."
Delta Nine
*All things serve the Beam*
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 02:47:46 -0800
--------
thunderchiefup@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> Dark Tower V
> by Stephen King
>
> Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
Why don't make yourself really useful and transcribe Lynne Cheney's
Sisters?
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
k00kologist Kimberly Kay Barnard (Bachelor of Science, Psychology &
longtime support group troll) tells an alt.support.depression.medication
poster what the alt.usenet.kooks awards are all about:
From: Kali
Newsgroups: alt.support.depression.medication,alt.usenet.kooks
Subject: Linda Gore's Speech, was: Re: WINNERS! Usenet Kook Awards,
December 2004
Message-ID:
The awards granted by alt.usenet.kooks are the official Usenet kook
awards, Linda. They were not created for the purpose of devaluing acts
of kindness. They were created, and are maintained, for the purpose of
recognizing abusive posters. Your fellow nominees are liars, bigots,
frauds, forgers, defamers, screed spammers, people who falsely accuse
others of stalking when they themselves are the stalkers, etc. You get
the picture. If you don't, return to the above link and read.
Not just anyone can be nominated; there are standards that must be
upheld. No one may be nominated for purposes of revenge or a joke. Not
all nominations are accepted. There must be evidence of abuse. You have
generated a lot of it. You are an abuser.
_ _ _ _ _
| | | | | | | | |
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_ _ _ _ _ _
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| | | |___ ___| \| | ___| |_|/ ___
| | | / __|/ _ \ . ` |/ _ \ __| / __|
| |_| \__ \ __/ |\ | __/ |_ \__ \
\___/|___/\___\_| \_/\___|\__| |___/
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/ _ \| | | __ \ | (_) |
/ /_\ \ |__ _ _ | | \/ |__ _ __ __ _ _| |__
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| | | | |_) | |_| | | |_\ \ | | | | | (_| | | |_) |
\_| |_/_.__/ \__,_| \____/_| |_|_| \__,_|_|_.__/
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,
Correspondent:: "Shaun aRe"
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:30:57 -0000
--------
"±" wrote in message
news:421DB0D2.A0E8E43C@hotmail.com...
> thunderchiefup@hotmail.com wrote:
> >
> > Dark Tower V
> > by Stephen King
> >
> > Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
>
> Why don't make yourself really useful and transcribe Lynne Cheney's
> Sisters?
By 'transcribe', you mean 'post nekkid pictures of' don'tchoo?
Shaun aRe
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 04:10:02 -0800
--------
Shaun aRe wrote:
>
> "±" wrote in message
> news:421DB0D2.A0E8E43C@hotmail.com...
> > thunderchiefup@hotmail.com wrote:
> > >
> > > Dark Tower V
> > > by Stephen King
> > >
> > > Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
> >
> > Why don't make yourself really useful and transcribe Lynne Cheney's
> > Sisters?
>
> By 'transcribe', you mean 'post nekkid pictures of' don'tchoo?
No - go back to bed.
>
> Shaun aRe
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,
Correspondent:: "Shaun aRe"
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 12:56:36 -0000
--------
"±" wrote in message
news:421DC41A.DA4F495D@hotmail.com...
> Shaun aRe wrote:
> >
> > "±" wrote in message
> > news:421DB0D2.A0E8E43C@hotmail.com...
> > > thunderchiefup@hotmail.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Dark Tower V
> > > > by Stephen King
> > > >
> > > > Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
> > >
> > > Why don't make yourself really useful and transcribe Lynne Cheney's
> > > Sisters?
> >
> > By 'transcribe', you mean 'post nekkid pictures of' don'tchoo?
>
> No go back to bed.
OK me no go back to bed.
You wake up good now 'K?
Shaun aRe