by Stephen King
He got wearily to his feet, reeled, and then walked slowly over to where Eddie Dean stood.
"Stop it," he said.
Eddie ignored him and went on dry-firing Roland's big gun at the dead man.
"Stop it, Eddie, he's dead. They're all dead. Your feet are bleeding."
Eddie ignored him and went on pulling the revolver's trigger. The babble of excited voices outside was closer. So were the sirens.
The gunslinger reached for the gun and pulled on it. Eddie turned on him, and before Roland was entirely sure what was happening, Eddie struck him on the side of the head with his own gun. Roland felt a warm gush of blood and collapsed against the wall. He struggled to stay on his feet--they had to get out of here, quick. But he could feel himself sliding down the wall in spite of his every effort, and then the world was gone for a little while in a drift of grayness.
25
He was out for no more than two minutes, and then he managed to get things back into focus and make it to his feet. Eddie was no longer in the hallway. Roland's gun lay on the chest of the dead man with the red hair. The gunslinger bent, fighting off a wave of dizziness, picked it up, and dropped it into its holster with an awkward, cross-body movement.
I want my damned fingers back, he thought tiredly, and sighed.
He tried to walk back into the ruins of the office, but the best he could manage was an educated stagger. He stopped, bent, and picked up all of Eddie's clothes that he could hold in the crook of his left arm. The howlers had almost arrived. Roland believed the men winding them were probably militia, a marshall's posse, something of that sort . . . but there was always the possibility they might be more of Balazar's men.
"Eddie," he croaked. His throat was sore and throbbing again, worse even than the swollen place on the side of his head where Eddie had struck him with the revolver.
Eddie didn't notice. Eddie was sitting on the floor with his brother's head cradled against his belly. He was shuddering all over and crying. The gunslinger looked for the door, didn't see it, and felt a nasty jolt that was nearly terror. Then he remembered. With both of them on this side, the only way to create the door was for him to make physical contact with Eddie.
He reached for him but Eddie shrank away, still weeping. "Don't touch me," he said.
"Eddie, it's over. They're all dead, and your brother's dead, too."
"Leave my brother out of this!" Eddie shrieked childishly, and another fit of shuddering went through him. He cradled the severed head to his chest and rocked it. He lifted his streaming eyes to the gunslinger's face.
"All the times he took care of me, man," he said, sobbing so hard the gunslinger could barely understand him. "All the times. Why couldn't I have taken care of him, just this once, after all the times he took care of me?"
He took care of you, all right, Roland thought grimly. Look at you, sitting there and shaking like a man who's eaten an apple from the fever-tree. He took care of you just fine.
"We have to go."
"Go?" For the first time some vague understanding came into Eddie's face, and it was followed immediately by alarm. "I ain't going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack."
Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.
"Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?" the gunslinger asked.
"I don't care," Eddie said. "Without Henry, it doesn't matter. Nothing does."
"Maybe it doesn't matter to you," Roland said, "but there are others involved, prisoner."
"Don't call me that!" Eddie shouted.
"I'll call you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you're in!" Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. "Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!"
Eddie looked at him, cheeks wet, eyes wide and frightened.
"THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!" an amplified voice said from outside. To Eddie the voice sounded eerily like the voice of a game-show host. "THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED--I REPEAT: THE S.W.A. T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED!"
"What's on the other side of that door for me?" Eddie asked the gunslinger quietly. "Go on and tell me. If you can tell me, maybe I'll come. But if you lie, I'll know."
"Probably death," the gunslinger said. "But before that happens, I don't think you'll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death--death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through . . ." His eyes gleamed. "If we win through, Eddie, you'll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams."
"What thing?"
"The Dark Tower."
"Where is this Tower?"
"Far from the beach where you found me. How far I know not."
"What is it?"
"I don't know that, either--except that it may be a kind of . . . of a bolt. A central linchpin that holds all of existence together. All existence, all time, and all size."
"You said four. Who are the other two?"
"I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn."
"As I was drawn. Or as you'd like to draw me."
"Yes."
From outside there was a coughing explosion like a mortar round. The glass of The Leaning Tower's front window blew in. The barroom began to fill with choking clouds of teargas.
"Well?" Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.
"Quests, adventures, Towers, worlds to win," Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh teargas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar's office. "Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing."
"What's that?"
"The beautiful bare-breasted girls."
The gunslinger smiled. "On the way to the Dark Tower," he said, "anything is possible."
Another shudder wracked Eddie's body. He raised Henry's head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.
"Okay," he said. "I didn't have anything else planned for tonight, anyway."
"Take these," Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. "Put on your shoes if nothing else. You've cut your feet."
On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing plexiglass faceplates, flak-jackets, and Kelvar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower's front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie's jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie's neck again and Eddie gripped Roland's left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn't been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago--just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.
They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.
On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps--the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.
"Wait!" he shouted. "I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The scag! If
they were keeping Henry doped, there's gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!"
He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger's face was stony.
"That part of your life is over, Eddie," he said. He reached out with his left hand.
"No!" Eddie screamed, clawing at him. "No, you don't get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!"
He might as well have been clawing stone.
The gunslinger swept the door shut.
It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.
"No!" Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.
"Your need will pass," the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie's jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
Cheeflet.
Medicine from that other world.
"Kill or cure," Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.
SHUFFLE
shuffle
The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn't really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a card-sharp's rapid shuffle.
Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn't know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There was no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private hell: Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.
"It was less than a week," Eddie said. "That's all I know for sure."
"How do you know that?"
"A week's worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own."
"Get well or die."
"Right."
shuffle
There's a gunshot as twilight draws down to dark, a dry crack impinging on the inevitable and ineluctable sound of the breakers dying on the desolate beach: KA-BLAM! He smells a whiff of gunpowder. Trouble, the gunslinger thinks weakly, and gropes for revolvers that aren't there. Oh no, it's the end, it's . . .
But there's no more. as something starts to smell
shuffle
good in the dark. Something, after all this long dark dry time, something is cooking. It's not just the smell. He can hear the snap and pop of twigs, can see the faint orange flicker of a campfire. Sometimes, when the sea-breeze gusts, he smells fragrant smoke as well as that mouth-watering other smell. Food, he thinks. My God, am I hungry? If I'm hungry, maybe I'm getting well.
Eddie, he tries to say, but his voice is all gone. His throat hurts, hurts so bad. We should have brought some astin, too, he thinks, and then tries to laugh: all the drugs for him, none for Eddie.
Eddie appears. He's got a tin plate, one the gunslinger would know anywhere: it came, after all, from his own purse. On it are streaming chunks of whitish-pink meat.
What? he tries to ask, and nothing comes out but a squeaky little farting sound.
Eddie reads the shape of his lips. "I don't know," he says crossly. "All I know is it didn't kill me. Eat it, damn you."
He sees Eddie is very pale, Eddie is shaking, and he smells something coming from Eddie that is either shit or death, and he knows Eddie is in a bad way. He reaches out a groping hand, wanting to give comfort. Eddie strikes it away.
"I'll feed you," he says crossly. "Fucked if I know why. I ought to kill you. I would, if I didn't think that if you could get through into my world once, maybe you could do it again."
Eddie looks around.
"And if it wasn't that I'd be alone. Except for them."
He looks back at Roland and a fit of shuddering runs through him--it is so fierce that he almost spills the chunks of meat on the tin plate. At last it passes.
"Eat, God damn you."
The gunslinger eats. The meat is more than not bad; the meat is delicious. He manages three pieces and then everything blurs into a new
shuffle
effort to speak, but all he can do is whisper. The cup of Eddie's ear is pressed against his lips, except every now and then it shudders away as Eddie goes through one of his spasms. He says it again. "North. Up . . . up the beach."
"How do you know?"
"Just know," he whispers.
Eddie looks at him. "You're crazy," he says.
The gunslinger smiles and tries to black out but Eddie slaps him, slaps him hard. Roland's blue eyes fly open and for a moment they are so alive and electric Eddie looks uneasy. Then his lips draw back in a smile that is mostly snarl.
"Yeah, you can drone off," he said, "but first you gotta take your dope. It's time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I was never no Boy Scout, so I don't know for sure. But I guess it's close enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland. Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you kidnapping fuck."
The gunslinger opens his mouth like a baby for the breast. Eddie puts two of the pills in his mouth and then slops fresh water carelessly into Roland's mouth. Roland guesses it must be from a hill stream somewhere to the east. It might be poison; Eddie wouldn't know fair water from foul. On the other hand, Eddie seems fine himself, and there's really no choice, is there? No.
He swallows, coughs, and nearly strangles while Eddie looks at him indifferently.
Roland reaches for him.
Eddie tries to draw away.
The gunslinger's bullshooter eyes command him.
Roland draws him close, so close he can smell the stink of Eddie's sickness and Eddie can smell the stink of his; the combination sickens and compels them both.
"Only two choices here," Roland whispers. "Don't know how it is in your world, but only two choices here. Stand and maybe live, or die on your knees with your head down and the stink of your own armpits in your nose. Nothing . . ." He hacks out a cough. "Nothing to me."
"Who are you?" Eddie screams at him.
"Your destiny, Eddie," the gunslinger whispers.
"Why don't you just eat shit and die?" Eddie asks him. The gunslinger tries to speak, but before he can he floats off as the cards
shuffle
KA-BLAM!
Roland opens his eyes on a billion stars wheeling through the blackness, then closes them again.
He doesn't know what's going on but he thinks everything's okay. The deck's still moving, the cards still
shuffle
More of the sweet, tasty chunks of meat. He feels better. Eddie looks better, too. But he also looks worried.
"They're getting closer," he says. "They may be ugly, but they ain't completely stupid. They know what I been doing. Somehow they know, and they don't dig it. Every night they get a little closer. It might be smart to move on when daybreak comes, if you can. Or it might be the last daybreak we ever see."
"What?" This is not exactly a whisper but a husk somewhere between a whisper and real speech.
"Them," Eddie says, and gestures toward the beach. " Dad-a-chack, dum-a-chum, and all that shit. I think they're like us, Roland--all for eating, but not too big on getting eaten."
Suddenly, in an utter blast of horror, Roland realizes what the whitish-pink chunks of meat Eddie has been feeding him have been. He cannot speak; revulsion robs him of what little voice he has managed to get back. But Eddie sees everything he wants to say on his face.
"What did you think I was doing?" he nearly snarls. "Calling R
ed Lobster for take-out?"
"They're poison," Roland whispers. "That's why--"
"Yeah, that's why you're hors de combat. What I'm trying to keep from you being, Roland my friend, is hors d'oeuvres as well. As far as poison goes, rattlesnakes are poison, but people eat them. Rattlesnake tastes real good. Like chicken. I read that somewhere. They looked like lobsters to me, so I decided to take a chance. What else were we gonna eat? Dirt? I shot one of the fuckers and cooked the living Christ out of it. There wasn't anything else. And actually, they taste pretty good. I been shooting one a night just after the sun starts to go down. They're not real lively until it gets completely dark. I never saw you turning the stuff down."
Eddie smiles.
"I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. I like to think I'm eating that dink. It, like, eases my mind, you know?"
"One of them ate part of me, too," the gunslinger husks out. "Two fingers, one toe."
"That's also cool," Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pallid, sharklike . . . but some of that ill look has gone now, and the smell of shit and death which has hung around him like a shroud seems to be going away.
"Fuck yourself," the gunslinger husks.
"Roland shows a flash of spirit!" Eddie cries. "Maybe you ain't gonna die after all! Dahling! I think that's mah-vellous!"
"Live," Roland says. The husk has become a whisper again. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.
"Yeah?" Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers his own question. "Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now it looks like you're going to get better. The antibiotics are helping, I guess, but mostly I think you're hauling yourself up. What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keep alive on this scuzzy beach?"
Tower, he mouths, because now he can't even manage a husk.
"You and your fucking Tower," Eddie says, starts to turn away, and then turns back, surprised, as Roland's hand clamps on his arm like a manacle.
They look into each other's eyes and Eddie says, "All right. All right!"
North, the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has he told him that? He thinks so, but it's lost. Lost in the shuffle.
"How do you know?" Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, then lowers them.