by Stephen King
“How old are you, John?” Roland asked him.
“Not s’ old I don’t still have a little get up n go,” John replied, a trifle coldly. “What about y’self, chummy? How many times you ducked under the pole?”
Roland gave him a smile-the kind that said point taken, now let’s change the subject. “Eddie will speak for both of us,” he said. They had decided on this during their ride from Bridgton.
“My own tale’s too long.”
“Do you say so,” John remarked.
“I do,” Roland said. “Let Eddie tell you his story, as much as he has time for, and we’ll both tell what we’d have you do, and then, if you agree, he’ll give you one thing to take to a man named Moses Carver… and I’ll give you another.”
John Cullum considered this, then nodded. He turned to Eddie.
Eddie took a deep breath. “The first thing you ought to know is that I met this guy here in a middle of an airplane flight from Nassau, the Bahamas, to Kennedy Airport in New York. I
was hooked on heroin at the time, and so was my brouier. I was muling a load of cocaine.”
“And when might this have been, son?” John Cullum asked.
“The summer of 1987.”
They saw wonder on Cullum’s face but no shade of disbelief.
“So you do come from the future! Gorry!” He leaned forward through the fragrant pipe-smoke. “Son,” he said, “tell your tale. And don’tcha skip a goddam word.”
FOUR
It took Eddie almost an hour and a half-and in the cause of brevity he did skip some of the things that had happened to them. By the time he’d finished, a premature night had settled on the lake below them. And still the threatening storm neither broke nor moved on. Above Dick Beckhardt’s cottage thunder sometimes rumbled and sometimes cracked so sharply they all jumped. A stroke of lightning jabbed directly into the center of the narrow lake below them, briefly illuminating the entire surface a delicate nacreous purple. Once the wind arose, making voices move through the trees, and Eddie thought It’ll come now, surely it will come now, but it did not. Nor did the impending storm leave, and this queer suspension, like a sword hanging by the thinnest of threads, made him think of Susannah’s long, strange pregnancy, now terminated. At around seven o’clock the power went out and John looked through the kitchen cabinets for a supply of candles while Eddie talked on-the old people of River Crossing, the mad people in the city of Lud, the terrified people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they’d met a former priest who seemed to have stepped directly out of a book. John put the candles on the table, along with crackers and cheese and a bottle of Red Zinger iced tea. Eddie finished with their visit to Stephen King, telling how the gunslinger had hypnotized the writer to forget their visit, how they had briefly seen their friend Susannah, and how they had called John Cullum because, as Roland said, there was no one else in this part of the world they could call. When Eddie fell silent, Roland told of meeting Chevin of Chayven on their way to Turtleback Lane.
The gunslinger laid the silver cross he’d shown Chevin on the table by the plate of cheese, and John poked the fine links of the chain with one thick thumbnail.
Then, for a long time, there was silence.
When he could bear it no longer, Eddie asked the old caretaker how much of the tale he believed.
“All of it,” John said without hesitation. “You gut to take care of that rose in New York, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
“Because that’s what’s kep’ one of those Beams safe while most of the others has been broken down by these what-do-youcall-em telepathies, the Breakers.”
Eddie was amazed at how quickly and easily Cullum had grasped that, but perhaps there was no reason to be. Fresh eyes see clear, Susannah liked to say. And Cullum was very much what the grays of Lud would have called “a trig cove.”
“Yes,” Roland said. ’You say true.”
“The rose is takin care of one Beam. Stephen King’s in charge of the other ’un. Least, that’s what you think.”
Eddie said, “He’d bear watching, John-all else aside, he’s got some lousy habits-but once we leave this world’s 1977, we can never come back and check on him.”
“King doesn’t exist in any of these other worlds?” John asked.
“Almost surely not,” Roland said.
“Even if he does,” Eddie put in, “what he does in them doesn’t matter. This is the key world. This, and the one Roland came from. This world and that one are twins.”
He looked at Roland for confirmation. Roland nodded and lit the last of the cigarettes John had given him earlier.
“I might be able to keep an eye on Stephen King,” John said.
“He don’t need to know I’m doin it, either. That is, if I get back from doin your cussed business in New York. I gut me a pretty good idear what it is, but maybe you’d better spell it out.”
From his back pocket he took a battered notepad with the words Mead Memo written on the green cover. He paged most of the way through it, found a blank sheet, produced a pencil from his breast pocket, licked the tip (Eddie restrained a shudder), and then looked at them as expectandy as any freshman on the first day of high school.
“Now, dearies,” he said, “why don’t you tell your Uncle John the rest.”
FIVE
This time Roland did most of the talking, and although he had less to say than Eddie, it still took him half an hour, for he spoke with great caution, every now and then turning to Eddie for help with a word or phrase. Eddie had already seen the killer and the diplomat who lived inside Roland of Gilead, but this was his first clear look at the envoy, a messenger who meant to get every word right. Outside, the storm still refused to break or to go away.
At last the gunslinger sat back. In the yellow glow of the candles, his face appeared both ancient and strangely lovely. Looking at him, Eddie for the first time suspected there might be more wrong with him than what Rosalita Munoz had called “the dry twist.” Roland had lost weight, and the dark circles beneath his eyes whispered of illness. He drank off a whole glass of the red tea at a single draught, and asked: “Do you understand the things I’ve told you?”
“Ayuh.” No more than that.
“Ken it very well, do ya?” Roland pressed. “No questions?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Tell it back to us, then.”
John had filled two pages with notes in his looping scrawl.
Now he paged back and forth between them, nodding to himself a couple of times. Then he grunted and returned the pad to his hip pocket. He may be a country cousin, but he’s a long way from stupid, Eddie thought. And meeting him was a long way from just luck; that was ka having a very good day.
“Go to New York,” John said. “Find this fella Aaron Deepneau.
Keep his buddy out of it. Convince Deepneau that takin care of the rose in that vacant lot is just about the most important job in the world.”
“You can cut the just-about,” Eddie said.
John nodded as if that went without saying. He picked up the piece of notepaper with the cartoon beaver on top and tucked it into his voluminous wallet. Passing the bill of sale to him had been one of the harder things Eddie Dean had had to do since being sucked through the unfound door and into East Stoneham, and he came close to snatching it back before it could disappear into the caretaker’s battered old Lord Buxton.
He thought he understood much better now about how Calvin Tower had felt.
“Because you boys now own the lot, you own the rose,” John said.
“The Tet Corporation now owns the rose,” Eddie said. “A corporation of which you’re about to become executive vicepresident.”
John Cullum looked unimpressed with his putative new title. He said, “Deepneau’s supposed to draw up articles of incorporation and make sure Tet’s legal. Then we go to see this fella Moses Carver and make sure he gets on board. That’s apt to be the hard part-” Haa-aad paa-aat “-but we’
ll give it our best go.”
“Put Auntie’s cross around your neck,” Roland said, “and when you meet with sai Carver, show it to him. It may go a long way toward convincing him you’re on the straight. But first you must blow on it, like this.”
On their ride from Bridgton, Roland had asked Eddie if he could think of any secret-no matter how trivial or great-which Susannah and her godfather might have shared in common.
As a matter of fact Eddie did know such a secret, and he was now astounded to hear Susannah speak it from the cross which lay on Dick Beckhardt’s pine table.
“We buried Pimsy under the apple tree, where he could watch the blossoms fall in the spring,” her voice said. “And Daddy Mose told me not to cry anymore, because God thinks to mourn a pet too long…”
Here the words faded away, first to a mutter and then to nothing at all. But Eddie remembered the rest and repeated it now: “’… to mourn a pet too long’s a sin.’ She said Daddy Mose told her she could go to Pimsy’s grave once in awhile and whisper ’Be happy in heaven’ but never to tell anyone else, because preachers don’t hold much with the idea of animals going to heaven. And she kept the secret. I was the only one she ever told.” Eddie, perhaps remembering that post-coital confidence in the dark of night, was smiling painfully.
John Cullum looked at the cross, then up at Roland, wideeyed.
“What is it? Some kind of tape recorder? It ain’t, is it?”
“It’s a sigul,” Roland said patiently. “One that may help you with this fellow Carver, if he turns out to be what Eddie calls “a hardass.’” The gunslinger smiled a litde. Hardass was a term he liked. One he understood. “Put it on.”
But Cullum didn’t, at least not at once. For the first time since the old fellow had come into their acquaintance-including that period when they’d been under fire in the General Store-he looked genuinely discomposed. “Is it magic?” he asked.
Roland shrugged impatiently, as if to tell John that the word had no useful meaning in this context, and merely repeated: “Put it on.”
Gingerly, as if he thought Aunt Talitha’s cross might glow redhot at any moment and give him a serious burn, John Cullum did as bid. He bent his head to look down at it (momentarily giving his long Yankee face an amusing burgher’s double chin), then tucked it into his shirt.
“Gorry,” he said again, very softly.
SIX
Aware that he was speaking now as once he’d been spoken to,
Eddie Dean said: “Tell the rest of your lesson, John of East Stoneham, and be true.”
Cullum had gotten out of bed that morning no more than a country caretaker, one of the world’s unknown and unseen.
He’d go to bed tonight with the potential of becoming one of the world’s most important people, a true prince of the Earth.
If he was afraid of the idea, it didn’t show. Perhaps he hadn’t grasped it yet.
But Eddie didn’t believe that. This was the man ka had put in their road, and he was both trig and brave. If Eddie had been Walter at this moment (or Flagg, as Walter sometimes called himself), he believed he would have trembled.
“Well,” John said, “it don’t mind a mite to ya who runs the company, but you want Tet to swallow up Holmes, because from now on the job doesn’t have anything to do with makin toothpaste and cappin teeth, although it may go on lookin that way yet awhile.”
“And what’s-”
Eddie got no further. John raised a gnarled hand to stop him. Eddie tried to imagine a Texas Instruments calculator in that hand and discovered he could, and quite easily. Weird.
“Gimme a chance, youngster, and I’ll tell you.”
Eddie sat back, making a zipping motion across his lips.
“Keep the rose safe, that’s first. Keep the writah safe, that’s second. But beyond that, me and this guy Deepneau and this other guy Carver are s’posed to build up one of the world’s most powerful corporations. We trade in real estate, we work with… uh…” He pulled out the battered green pad, consulted it quickly, and put it away. “We work with ’software developers,” whatever they are, because they’re gonna be the next wave of technology. We’re supposed to remember three words.”
He ticked them off. “Microsoft. Microchips. Intel. And n’matter how big we grow-or how fast-our three real jobs are the same: protect the rose, protect Stephen King, and try to screw over two other companies every chance we get. One’s called Sombra. Other’s…” There was the slightest of hesitations.
“The other’s North Central Positronics. Sombra’s mostly interested in proppity, accordin to you fellas. Positronics… well, science and gadgets, that’s obvious even to me. If Sombra wants a piece of land, Tet tries t’get it first. If North Central wants a patent, we try to get it first, or at least to frig it up for them.
Throw it to a third party if it comes to that.”
Eddie was nodding approval. He hadn’t told John that last, the old guy had come up with it on his own.
“We’re the Three Toothless Musketeers, the Old Farts of Apocalypse, and we’re supposed to keep those two outfits from gettin what they want, by fair means or foul. Dirty tricks most definitely allowed.” John grinned. “I never been to Harvard Business School"-Haa-vid Bi’ness School-"but I guess I can kick a fella in the crotch as well’s anyone.”
“Good,” Roland said. He started to get up. “I think it’s time we-”
Eddie raised a hand to stop him. Yes, he wanted to get to Susannah and Jake; couldn’t wait to sweep his darling into his arms and cover her face with kisses. It seemed years since he had last seen her on the East Road in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Yet he couldn’t leave it at this as easily as Roland, who had spent his life being obeyed and had come to take the death-allegiance of complete strangers as a matter of course. What Eddie saw on the other side of Dick Beckhardt’s table wasn’t another tool but an independent Yankee who was tough-minded and smart as a whip… but really too old for what they were asking. And speaking of too old, what about Aaron Deepneau, the Chemotherapy Kid?
“My friend wants to get moving and so do I,” Eddie said.
“We’ve got miles to go yet.”
“I know that. It’s on your face, son. Like a scar.”
Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed.
“But why would you do this?” Eddie asked. “I have to know that. Why would you take all this on for two men you just met?”
John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and would wear until his death in the year of 1989-the cross given to Roland by an old woman in a forgotten town. He would touch it just that way in the years ahead when contemplating some big decision (the biggest might have been the one to sever Tet’s connection with IBM, a company that had shown an everincreasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or preparing for some covert action (the fire-bombing of Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi, for instance, in the year before he died). The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke again in Cullum’s presence no matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to sleep with his hand clasped around it, he would think: ’Tis a sigul. Tis a sigul, dear-something that came from another world.
If he had regrets toward the end (other than about some of the tricks, which were filthy indeed and cost more than one man his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the world on the other side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the town of Lovell. From time to time Roland’s sigul sent him dreams of a field filled with roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible visions of two crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly scanning the horizon. Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound of a man relentlessly winding his horn. From these latter dreams he would awake with tears on his cheeks, those of longing and loss and love. He would awake with h
is hand closed around the cross, thinking I denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger’s katet and the White and never once questioned the choice.
Yet for all that he wished he could have walked out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door.
Now he said: “You boys want all the right things. I can’t put it any clearer than that. I believe you.” He hesitated. “I believe in you. What I see in your eyes is true.”
Eddie thought he was done, and then Cullum grinned like a boy.
“Also it ’pears to me you’re offerin the keys to one humongous great engine.” Engyne. “Who wouldn’t want to turn it on, and see what it does?”
“Are you scared?” Roland asked.
John Cullum considered the question, then nodded.
“Ayuh,” he said.
Roland nodded. “Good,” he said.
SEVEN
They drove back up to Turtleback Lane in Cullum’s car beneath a black, boiling sky. Although diis was the height of the summer season and most of the cottages on Kezar were probably occupied, diey saw not a single car moving in either direction. All the boats on the lake had long since run for cover.
“Said I had somethin else for ya,” John said, and went to the back of his truck, where there was a steel lockbox snugged up against the cab. Now the wind had begun to blow. It swirled his scanty fluff of white hair around his head. He ran a combination, popped a padlock, and swung back the lockbox’s lid. From inside he brought out two dusty bags the wanderers knew well. One looked almost new compared to the other, which was the scuffed no-color of desert dust and laced its long length with rawhide.
“Our gunna!” Eddie cried, so delighted-and so amazed-tfiat the words almost came out in a scream. “How in the name of hell-?”
John offered them a smile that augured well for his future as a dirty trickster: bemused on the surface, sly beneath. “Nice surprise, ain’t it? Thought so m’self. I went back to get a look at Chip’s store-what ’us left of it-while there was still a lot of confusion. People runnin hither, thither, and yon is what I mean to say; coverin bodies, stringin that yella tape, takin pitchers.