by Stephen King
A white woman lay on one of them. Her legs-the very ones Susannah had used on their todash visit to New York, Roland had no doubt-were spread wide. A woman with the head of a rat-one of the taheen, he felt sure-bent between them.
Next to the white woman was a dark-skinned one whose legs ended just below the knees. Floating naked or not, nauseated or not, todash or not, Roland had never in his life been so glad to see anyone. And Eddie felt the same. Roland heard him cry out joyfully in the center of his head and reached a hand to still the younger man. He had to still him, for Susannah was looking at them, had almost certainly seen them, and if she spoke to them, he needed to hear every word she said. Because although those words would come from her mouth, it would very likely be the Beam that spoke; the Voice of die Bear or that of the Turde.
Both women wore metal hoods over their hair. A length of segmented steel hose connected them.
Some kind of Vulcan mind-meld, Eddie said, once again filling the center of his head and blotting out everything else. Or maybe-
Hush! Roland broke in. Hush, Eddie, for your father’s sake!
A man wearing a white coat seized a pair of cruel-looking forceps from a tray and pushed the rathead taheen nurse aside.
He bent, peering up between Mia’s legs and holding the forceps above his head. Standing close by, wearing a tee-shirt with words of Eddie and Susannah’s world on it, was a taheen with the head of a fierce brown bird.
He’ll sense us, Roland thought. If we stay long enough, he’ll surely sense us and raise the alarm.
But Susannah was looking at him, the eyes below the clamp of the hood feverish. Bright with understanding. Seeing them, aye, say true.
She spoke a single word, and in a moment of inexplicable but perfecdy reliable intuition, Roland understood the word came not from Susannah but from Mia. Yet it was also the Voice of the Beam, a force perhaps sentient enough to understand how seriously it was threatened, and to want to protect itself.
Chassit was the word Susannah spoke; he heard it in his head because they were ka-tet and an-tet; he also saw it form soundlessly on her lips as she looked up toward the place where they floated, onlookers at something that was happening in some other where and when at this very moment.
The hawk-headed taheen looked up, perhaps following her gaze, perhaps hearing the chimes with its preternaturally sharp ears. Then the doctor lowered his forceps and thrust them beneath Mia’s gown. She shrieked. Susannah shrieked with her. And as if Roland’s essentially bodiless being could be pushed away by the force of those combined screams like a milkweed pod lifted and carried on a gust of October wind, the gunslinger felt himself rise violendy, losing touch with this place as he went, but holding onto that one word. It brought with it a brilliant memory of his mother leaning over him as he lay in bed. In the room of many colors, this had been, the nursery, and of course now he understood the colors he’d only accepted as a young boy, accepted as children barely out of their clouts accept everything: with unquestioning wonder, with the unspoken assumption that it’s all magic.
The windows of the nursery had been stained glass representing the Bends O’The Rainbow, of course. He remembered his mother leaning toward him, her face pied with that lovely various light, her hood thrown back so he could trace the curve of her neck with the eye of a child
(it’s all magic)
and the soul of a lover; he remembered thinking how he would court her and win her from his father, if she would have him; how they would marry and have children of their own and live forever in that fairy-tale kingdom called the All-A-Glow; and how she sang to him, how Gabrielle Deschain sang to her little boy with his big eyes looking solemnly up at her from his pillow and his face already stamped with the many swimming colors of his wandering life, singing a lilting nonsense song that went like this:
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to Jill your basket!
Enough to fill my basket, he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren’t quite nonsense but old numbers, she’d told him once when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.
Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Of course, it’s all nineteen.
Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake’s left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.
Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my basket.
But what basket? What does it mean?
FOUR
Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum’s twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer and she was just getting wa’amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazily back and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with the car’s motion like corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debris which collects in any old car that’s been hard-used: the ashes and pens and paperclips and the world’s oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat and pine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door.
Someone passing would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff-and people! people who might be dead!-floating around in the car like jetsam in a space capsule. But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lake were mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even though there was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke was almost gone.
Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him. Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways motion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek.
FIVE
Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as well. That was why she’d labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of them.
The boy and the Pere had entered the Dixie Pig, a tiling that was either very brave or very foolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on what they’d found there.
Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had come ready to fight. Callahan was holdingjake’s gun… and another thing, as well: some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of the little gods. The boy had Susannah’s ’Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved from only the gods knew where.
The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanity ended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she’d been wearing hung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood a good many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not his attention-like that of the boy and the Pere at this very moment-been focused on other matters.
Callahan’s low men, for instance. They might well be taheen, creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two. They certainly weren’t the sort of beings Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen as a result of the old ones’ ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, they might be genuine taheen, sometimes known as the third people o
r the can-toi, and yes,
Roland should have known. How many of the taheen now served the being known as the Crimson King? Some? Many?
All?
SIX
If the third answer was the correct one, Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger’s nature, and in this case his lack of imagination was surely a blessing.
He saw what he needed to see. Although the can-toi-Callahan’s low folk-had surrounded Jake and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn’t even seen the duo behind them, the ones who’d been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street),
the Pere had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with the key he’d found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort to grab it.
Yet there was another problem, one Roland’s eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush, fixed upon at once. He saw the blasphemous parody of Eld’s Last Fellowship on the wall and understood its significance completely in the seconds before it was ripped away. And the smell: not just flesh but human flesh. This too he would have understood earlier, had he had time to think about it… only life in Calla Bryn Sturgis had allowed him little time to think. In die Calla, as in a storybook, life had been one damned thing after another.
Yet it was clear enough now, wasn’t it? The low folk might only be taheen; a child’s ogres, if it did ya. Those behind the tapestry were what Callahan had called Type One vampires and what Roland himself knew as the Grandfathers, perhaps the most gruesome and powerful survivors of the Prims long-ago recession. And while such as the taheen might be content to stand as they were, gawking at the sigul Callahan held up, the Grandfathers wouldn’t spare it a second glance.
Now clattering bugs came pouring out from under the table. They were of a sort Roland had seen before, and any doubts he might still have held about what was behind that tapestry departed at the sight of them. They were parasites, blood-drinkers, camp-followers: Grandfather-fleas. Probably not dangerous while there was a bumbler present, but of course when you spied the little doctors in such numbers, the Grandfathers were never far behind.
As Oy charged at the bugs, Roland of Gilead did the only thing he could think of: he swam down to Callahan.
Into Callahan.
SEVEN
Pere, I am here.
Aye, Roland. What-
No time. GET HIM OUT OF HERE. You must. Get him out while there’s still time!
EIGHT
And Callahan tried. The boy, of course, didn’t want to go.
Looking at him through the Pere’s eyes, Roland thought with some bitterness: / should have schooled him better in betrayal. Yet all the gods know I did the best I could.
“Go while you can,” Callahan told Jake, striving for calmness.
“Catch up to her ifyou can. This is the command of your dinh. This is also the will of the White.”
It should have moved him but it didn’t, he still argued-gods, he was nearly as bad as Eddie!-and Roland could wait no longer.
Pere, let me.
Roland seized control without waiting for a reply. He could already feel the wave, the aven kal, beginning to recede. And the Grandfathers would come at any second.
“Go, Jake!” he cried, using the Pere’s mouth and vocal cords like a loudspeaker. If he had thought about how one might do something like this, he would have been lost completely, but thinking about things had also never been his way, and he was grateful to see the boy’s eyes flash wide. “You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command you!”
Then, as in the hospital ward with Susannah, he felt himself once more tossed upward like something without weight, blown out of Callahan’s mind and body like a bit of cobweb or a fluff of dandelion thistle. For a moment he tried to flail his way back, like a swimmer trying to buck a strong currentjust long enough to reach the shore, but it was impossible.
Roland/That was Eddie’s voice, and filled with dismay. Jesus, Roland, what in God’s name are those things?
The tapestry had been torn aside. The creatures which rushed out were ancient and freakish, their warlock faces warped with teeth growing wild, their mouths propped open by fangs as thick as the gunslinger’s wrists, their wrinkled and stubbled chins slick with blood and scraps of meat.
And still-gods, oh gods-the boy remained!
“They’ll kill Oy first!” Callahan shouted, only Roland didn’t think it was Callahan. He thought it was Eddie, using Callahan’s voice as Roland had. Somehow Eddie had found either smoother currents or more strength. Enough to get inside after Roland had been blown out. “They ’II kill him in front of you and drink his blood!”
It was finally enough. The boy turned and fled with Oy running beside him. He cut directly in front of the waseautaheen and between two of the low folken, but none made any effort to grab him. They were still staring at the raised Turtle on Callahan’s palm, mesmerized.
The Grandfathers paid no attention to the fleeing boy at all, as Roland had felt sure they would not. He knew from Pere Callahan’s story that one of the Grandfathers had come to the little town of “Salem’s Lot” where the Pere had for awhile preached. The Pere had lived through the experience-not common for those who faced such monsters after losing their weapons and siguls of power-but the thing had forced Callahan to drink of its tainted blood before letting him go. It had marked him for these others.
Callahan was holding his cross-sigul out toward them, but before Roland could see anything else, he was exhaled back into darkness. The chimes began again, all but driving him mad with their awful tintinnabulation. Somewhere, faintly, he could hear Eddie shouting. Roland reached for him in the dark, brushed Eddie’s arm, lost it, found his hand, and seized it. They rolled over and over, clutching each other, trying not to be separated, hoping not to be lost in the doorless dark between the worlds.
Chapter III:
EDDIE MAKES A CALL
ONE
Eddie returned to John Cullum’s old car the way he’d sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let alone where.
He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and Roland were floating in each other’s arms like unborn twins in the womb, only this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape. Don’t waste your time, John, he thought. No true thread there, that’s a dead-end gadget if there ever was one.
Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the domelight of John Cullum’s scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w-
Then gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford’s cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie’s midsection hit the top of the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh.
Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.
Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!
How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but there, the sound of besual, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.
Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger’s left hand, thinking-
He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.
May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it-
“-and may you climb to the top,” Eddie breathed.
They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked-askew but otherwise peacefully enough-at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day, but
what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them-
Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it and forced it down.
“Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone.” A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was right, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s eyes were shiny with tears. “He’s gone, too. The Pere.”
“The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did… Did they…?” Eddie couldn’t finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one of them was too awful to speak aloud.
“No, Eddie. Not at all. He-” Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking at Eddie as he did it.
“He escaped them,” Eddie said.
“Aye, and how angry they must be.”
Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No, sobbing. “Good,” he said. “Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself witfi it.” And as Roland did: “What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?”
“I think it was a bit of both,” Roland said. “There’s a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it.”
“And allowed to see what we wanted to see.”