by Stephen King
The gunslinger dropped a hand to his left hip as he turned toward the street, an old habit that paid no comfort this time; both revolvers were in die trunk of Cullum’s Galaxie, wrapped in their cartridge belts.
Before he could get going again, Eddie grabbed his shoulder.
The gunslinger swung round, eyebrows raised, faded eyes on his friend.
“We have a saying in our world, Roland-we say so-and-so was grasping at straws.”
“And what does it mean?”
“This,” Eddie said bleakly. “What we’re doing. Wish me good luck, fella.”
Roland nodded. “Aye, so I do. Both of us.”
He began to turn away and Eddie called him back again.
This time Roland wore an expression of faint impatience.
“Don’t get killed crossing the street,” Eddie said, and then briefly mimicked Cullum’s way of speaking. “Summah folks’re thicker’n ticks on a dog. And they’re not ridin hosses.”
“Make your call, Eddie,” Roland said, and then crossed Bridgton’s high street with slow confidence, walking in the same rolling gait that had taken him across a thousand other high streets in a thousand small towns.
Eddie watched him, then turned to the telephone and consulted the directions. After that he lifted the receiver and dialed the number for Directory Assistance.
SIX
He didn’t go, the gunslinger had said, speaking of John Cullum with flat certainty. And why? Because Cullum was the end of the line, there was no one else for them to call. Roland of Gilead’s damned old ka, in other words.
After a brief wait, the Directory Assistance operator coughed up Cullum’s number. Eddie tried to memorize it-he’d always been good at remembering numbers, Henry had sometimes called him Little Einstein-but this time he couldn’t be confident of his ability. Something seemed to have happened either to his thinking processes in general (which he didn’t believe) or to his ability to remember certain artifacts of this world (which he sort of did). As he asked for the number a second time-and wrote it in the gathered dust on the phone kiosk’s litde ledge-Eddie found himself wondering if he’d still be able to read a novel, or follow the plot of a movie from the succession of images on a screen. He rather doubted it. And what did it matter? The Magic Lantern next door was showing Star Wars, and Eddie thought that if he made it to the end of his life’s path and into the clearing without another look at Luke Skywalker and another listen to Darth Vader’s noisy breathing, he’d still be pretty much okay.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he told the operator, and was about to dial again when there was a series of explosions behind him. Eddie whirled, heart-rate spiking, right hand dipping, expecting to see Wolves, or harriers, or maybe that son of a bitch Flagg-
What he saw was a convertible filled with laughing, goofytaced high school boys with sunburned cheeks. One of had just tossed out a string of firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July-what kids their age in Calla Bryn Sturgis would have called bangers.
If I’d had a gun on my hip, I might have shot a couple of those bucks, Eddie thought. You want to talk goofy, start with that. Yes.
Well. And maybe he might not have. Either way, he had to admit the possibility that he was no longer exactly safe in the more civilized quarters.
“Live with it,” Eddie murmured, then added the great sage and eminent junkie’s favorite advice for life’s little problems:
“Deal.n He dialed John Cullum’s number on the old-fashioned rotary phone, and when a robot voice-Blaine the Mono’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, mayhap-asked him to deposit ninety cents, Eddie dropped in a buck. What the hell, he was saving the world.
The phone rang once… rang twice… and was picked up!
“John!” Eddie almost yelled. “Good fucking deal! John, this is-”
But the voice on the other end was already speaking. As a child of the late eighties, Eddie knew this did not bode well.
“-have reached John Cullum of Cullum Caretakin and Camp Checkin,” said Cullum’s voice in its familiar slow Yankee drawl. “I gut called away kinda sudden, don’tcha know, and can’t say with any degree a’ certainty just when I’ll be back. If this inconveniences ya, I beg pa’aad’n, but you c’n call Gary Crowell, at 926-5555, or Junior Barker, at 929-4211.”
Eddie’s initial dismay had departed-depaa-aated, Cullum himself would have said-right around the time the man’s wavery recorded voice was telling Eddie that he, Cullum, couldn’t say with any degree of certainty when he’d be back.
Because Cullum was right there, in his hobbity little cottage on the western shore of Keywadin Pond, either sitting on his overstuffed hobbity sofa or in one of the two similarly overstuffed hobbity chairs. Sitting there and monitoring messages on his no-doubt-clunky mid-seventies answering machine. And Eddie knew this because… well… Because he just knew.
The primitive recording couldn’t completely hide the sly humor that had crept into Cullum’s voice by the end of the message.
“Coss, if you’re still set on talkin to nobody but yours truly, you c’n leave me a message at the beep. Keep it short.” The final word came out shawt.
Eddie waited for the beep and then said, “It’s Eddie Dean,
John. I know you’re there, and I think you’ve been waiting for my call. Don’t ask me why I think that, because I don’t really know, but-”
There was a loud click in Eddie’s ear, and then Cullum’s voice-his live voice-said, “Hello there, son, you takin good care of my car?”
For a moment Eddie was too bemused to reply, for Cullum’s Downeast accent had turned the question into something quite different: You takin good care ofmyka?
“Boy?” Cullum asked, suddenly concerned. ’You still on the wire?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, “and so are you. I thought you were going to Vermont, John.”
“Well, I tell you what. This place ain’t seen a day this excitin prob’ly since South Stoneham Shoe burnt down in 1923. The cops’ve gut all the ruds out of town blocked off.”
Eddie was sure they were letting folks through the roadblocks if they could show proper identification, but he ignored that issue in favor of something else. “Want to tell me you couldn’t find your way out of that town without seeing a single cop, if it suited your fancy?”
There was a brief pause. In it, Eddie became aware of someone at his elbow. He didn’t turn to look; it was Roland. Who else in this world would smell-subtly but unquestionably-of another world?
“Oh, well,” Cullum said at last. “Maybe I do know a woods road or two that come out over in Lovell. It’s been a dry summer, n I guess I could get m’truck up em.”
“One or two?”
“Well, say three or four.” A pause, which Eddie didn’t break.
He was having too much fun. “Five or six,” Cullum amended, and Eddie chose not to respond to this, either. “Eight,” Cullum said at last, and when Eddie laughed, Cullum joined in. “What’s on your mind, son?”
Eddie glanced at Roland, who was holding out a tin of aspirin between die two remaining fingers of his right hand.
Eddie took it gratefully. “I want you to come over to Lovell,” he said to Cullum. “Seems like we might have a litde more palavering to do, after all.”
“Ayuh, and it seems like I musta known it,” Cullum said,
“although it was never right up on the top of my mind; up there I kep’ thinkin ’I’ll be gettin on the road to Montpelier soon,” and still I kep’ findin one more thing and one more diing to do around here. If you’da called five minutes ago, you woulda gotten a busy-I ’us on the phone to Charlie Beemer. It was his wife ’n sister-in-law that got killed in the market, don’t you know. And then I thought, ’What the hell, I’ll just give the whole place a good sweep before I put my gear in the back of the truck and go.’ Notfiin up on top is what I’m sayin, but down underneath I guess I been waitin for your call ever since I got back here. Where’ll you be? Turtleback Lane?”
Ed
die popped open the aspirin tin and looked greedily at the little line-up of tablets. Once a junkie, always a junkie, he reckoned. Even when it came to this stuff. “Ayuh,” he said, with his tongue only pardy in his cheek; he had become quite the mimic of regional dialects since meeting Roland on a Delta jet descending into Kennedy Airport. ’You said that lane was nothing but a two-mile loop off Route 7, didn’t you?”
“So I did. Some very nice homes along Turtleback.” A brief, reflective pause. “And a lot of em for sale. There’s been quite a number of walk-ins in that part of the world just lately. As I may have also mentioned. Such things make folks nervous, and rich folks, at least, c’n afford to get away from what makes it ha’ad to sleep at night.”
Eddie could wait no longer; he took three of the aspirin and tossed them into his mouth, relishing the bitter taste as they dissolved on his tongue. Bad as die pain currendy was, he would have borne twice as much if he could have heard from Susannah.
But she was quiet. He had an idea that the line of communication between them, chancy at best, had ceased to exist with the coming of Mia’s damned baby.
“You boys might want to keep your shootin irons close at hand if you’re headed over to Turtleback in Lovell,” Cullum said. “As for me, I think I’ll just toss m’shotgun in m’truck before I set sail.”
“Why not?” Eddie agreed. “You want to look for your car along the loop, okay? You’ll find it.”
“Ayuh, that old Galaxie’s ha’ad to miss,” Cullum agreed.
“Tell me somethin, son. I’m not goin to V’mont, bvit I gut a feelin you mean to send me somewhere, if I agree to go. You mind tellin me where?”
Eddie thought that Mark Twain might elect to call the next chapter of John Cullum’s no doubt colorful life A Maine Yankee in the Crimson King’s Court, but elected not to say so.
“Have you ever been to New York City?”
“Gorry, yes. Had a forty-eight-hour pass there, when I was in the Army.” The final word came out in a ridiculously flat drawl.
“Went to Radio City Music Hall and the Empire State Buildin, that much I remember. Musta made a few other tourist stops, though, because I lost thirty dollars out of m’wallet and a couple of months later I got diagnosed with a pretty fine case of the clap.”
“This time you’ll be too busy to catch the clap. Bring your credit cards. I know you have some, because I got a look at the receipts in your glove-compartment.” He felt an almost insane urge to draw the last word out, make it compaa-aaaatment.
“Mess in there, ennit?” Cullum asked equably.
“Ayuh, looks like what was left when the dog chewed the shoes. See you in Lovell, John.” Eddie hung up. He looked at the bag Roland was carrying and lifted his eyebrows.
“It’s a poorboy sanditch,” Roland said. “With lots of mayo, whatever that is. I’d want a sauce that didn’t look quite so much like come, myself, but may it do ya fine.”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “Gosh, that’s a real appetite-builder.”
“Do you say so?”
Eddie had to remind himself once more that Roland had almost no sense of humor. “I do, I do. Come on. I can eat my come-and-cheese sandwich while I drive. Also, we need to talk about how we’re going to handle this.”
SEVEN
The way to handle it, both agreed, was to tell John Cullum as much of their tale as they thought his credulity (and sanity) could stand. Then, if all went well, they would entrust him with the vital bill of sale and send him to Aaron Deepneau.
With strict orders to make sure he spoke to Deepneau apart from the not entirely trustworthy Calvin Tower.
“Cullum and Deepneau can work together to track Moses Carver down,” Eddie said, “and I think I can give Cullum enough information about Suze-private stuff-to convince Carver that she’s still alive. After that, though… well, a lot depends on how convincing those two guys can be. And how eager they are to work for the Tet Corporation in their sunset years. Hey, they may surprise us! I can’t see Cullum in a suit and tie, but traveling around the country and throwing monkeywrenches in Sombra’s business?” He considered, head cocked, then nodded with a smile. “Yeah. I can see that pretty well.” A “Susannah’s godfather is apt to be an old codger himself,”
Roland observed. “Just one of a different color. Such fellows often speak their own language when they’re an-tet. And mayhap I can give John Cullum something that will help convince Carver to throw in with us.”
“Asigul?”
“Yes.”
Eddie was intrigued. “What kind?”
But before Roland could answer, they saw something that made Eddie stomp on the brake-pedal. They were in Lovell now, and on Route 7. Ahead of them, staggering unsteadily along the shoulder, was an old man with snarled and straggly white hair. He wore a clumsy wrap of dirty cloth that could by no means be called a robe. His scrawny arms and legs were whipped with scratches. There were sores on them as well, burning a dull red. His feet were bare, and equipped with ugly and dangerous-looking yellow talons instead of toes. Clasped under one arm was a splintery wooden object that might have been a broken lyre. Eddie thought no one could have looked more out of place on this road, where the only pedestrians they had seen so far were serious-looking exercisers, obviously from “away,” looking ever so put-together in their nylon jogging shorts, baseball hats, and tee-shirts (one jogger’s shirt bore the legend DON’T SHOOT THE TOURISTS).
The thing that had been trudging along the berm of Route 7 turned toward them, and Eddie let out an involuntary cry of horror. Its eyes bled together above the bridge of its nose, reminding him of a double-yolked egg in a frypan. A fang depended from one nostril like a bone booger. Yet somehow worst of all was the dull green glow that baked out from the creature’s face. It was as if its skin had been painted with some sort of thin fluorescent gruel.
It saw them and immediately dashed into the woods, dropping its splintered lyre behind.
“Christ!” Eddie screamed. If that was a walk-in, he hoped never to see another.
“Stop, Eddie!” Roland shouted, then braced die heel of one hand against the dashboard as Cullum’s old Ford slid to a dusty halt close to where the thing had vanished.
“Open the backhold,” Roland said as he opened the door.
“Get my widowmaker.”
“Roland, we’re in kind of a hurry here, and Turtleback Lane’s still three miles north. I really think we ought to-”
“Shut your fool’s mouth and get it!” Roland roared, then ran to the edge of the woods. He drew a deep breath, and when he shouted after the rogue creature, his voice sent gooseflesh racmg up Eddie’s arms. He had heard Roland speak so once or twice before, but in between it was easy to forget that the blood of a King ran in his veins.
He spoke several phrases Eddie could not understand, then one he could: “So come forth, ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost, and make your bow before me, Roland, son of Steven, of the Line of Eld!”
For a moment there was nothing. Eddie opened the Ford’s trunk and brought Roland his gun. Roland strapped it on without so much as a glance at Eddie, let alone a word of thanks.
Perhaps diirty seconds went by. Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, the dusty roadside foliage began to shake. A moment or two later, the misbegotten thing reappeared.
It staggered with its head lowered. On the front of its robe was a large wet patch. Eddie could smell the reek of a sick thing’s urine, wild and strong.
Yet it made a knee and raised one misshapen hand to its forehead, a doomed gesture of fealty that made Eddie feel like weeping. “Hile, Roland of Gilead, Roland of Eld! Will you show me some sigul, dear?”
In a town called River Crossing, an old woman who called herself Aunt Talitha had given Roland a silver cross on a finelink silver chain. He’d worn it around his neck ever since. Now he reached into his shirt and showed it to the kneeling creature-a slow mutie dying of radiation sickness, Eddie was quite sure-and the thing gave a cracked cry o
f wonder.
“Would’ee have peace at the end of your course, thou Child of Roderick? Would’ee have the peace of the clearing?”
“Aye, my dear,” it said, sobbing, then added a great deal more in some gibberish tongue Eddie couldn’t understand.
Eddie looked both ways along Route 7, expecting to see traffic-this was the height of the summer season, after all-but spied nothing in either direction. For the moment, at least, their luck still held.
“How many of you are there in these parts?” Roland asked, interrupting the walk-in. As he spoke, he drew his revolver and raised that old engine of death until it lay against his shirt.
The Child of Roderick tossed its hand at the horizon without looking up. “Delah, gunslinger,” he said, “for here the worlds are thin, say anro con fa; sey-sey desenefanno billet cobair can. I Chevin devardan do. Because I felt sat for dem. Can-toi, can-tah, canDiscordia, aven la cam mah can. May-mi?Iffin lah vainen, eth-”
“How many dan devar?”
It thought about Roland’s question, then spread its fingers
(there were ten, Eddie noted) five times. Fifty. Although fifty of what, Eddie didn’t know.
“And Discordia?” Roland asked sharply. “Do you truly say so?”
“Oh aye, so says me, Chevin of Chayven, son of Hamil, minstrel of the South Plains that were once my home.”
“Say the name of the town that stands near Castle Discordia and I’ll release you.”
“Ah, gunslinger, all there are dead.”
“I think not. Say it.”
“Fedic!” screamed Chevin of Chayven, a wandering musica who could never have suspected its life would end in such a far, strange place-not the plains of Mid-World but the mountains of western Maine. It suddenly raised its horrid, glowing face to Roland. It spread its arms wide, like something which has been crucified. “Fedic on the far side of Thunderclap, on the Path of the Beam! On VShardik, VMaturin, the Road to the Dark T-”
Roland’s revolver spoke a single time. The bullet took the kneeling thing in the center of its forehead, completing the ruin of its ruined face. As it was flung backward, Eddie saw its flesh turn to greenish smoke as ephemeral as a hornet’s wing.