The Dark Tower tdt-7

by Stephen King

  “What does it mean?”

  Roland stood up. “It’s too much to go into. Would you like to wait for me while I go in there?” He nodded in the direction of the tower with its black glass windows glittering in the sun.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would. I’ll just sit on the bench in the sunshine and wait for you. It’s… refreshing. Does that sound crazy?”

  “No,” he said. “If someone whose looks you don’t trust should speak to you, Irene-I think it unlikely, because this is a safe place, but it’s certainly possible-concentrate just as hard as you can, and call for me.”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you talking ESP?”

  He didn’t know what ESP stood for, but he understood what she meant, and nodded.

  “You’d hear that? Hear me?”

  He couldn’t say for sure that he would. The building might be equipped with damping devices, like the thinking-caps the can-toi wore, that would make it impossible.

  “I might. And as I say, trouble’s unlikely. This is a safe place.”

  She looked at the turde, its shell gleaming with spray from the fountain. “It is, isn’t it?” She started to smile, then stopped.

  “You’ll come back, won’t you? You wouldn’t dump me without at least…” She shrugged one shoulder. The gesture made her look very young. “Without at least saying goodbye?”

  “Never in life. And my business in yonder tower shouldn’t take long.” In fact it was hardly business at all… unless, that was, whoever was currently running the Tet Corporation had some with him. “We have another place to go, and it’s there Oy and I would take our leave of you.”

  “Okay,” she said, and sat on the bench with the bumbler at her feet. The end of it was damp and she was wearing a new pair of slacks (bought in the same quick shopping-run that had netted Roland’s new shirt and jeans), but this didn’t bother her.

  They would dry quickly on such a warm, sunny day, and she found she wanted to be near the turtle sculpture. To study its tiny, timeless black eyes while she listened to those sweet voices.

  She thought that would be very restful. It was not a word she usually thought of in connection with New York, but this was a very un-New York place, with its feel of quiet and peace. She thought she might bring David here, diat if they could sit on this bench he might hear the story of her missing three days without thinking her insane. Or too insane.

  Roland started away, moving easily-moving like a man who could walk for days and weeks without ever varying his pace. I wouldn’t like to have him on my trail, she thought, and shivered a little at the idea. He reached the iron gate through which he would pass to the sidewalk, then turned to her once more. He spoke in a soft singsong.

  “See the TURTLE of enormous girth!

  On his shell he holds the earth.

  His thought is slow but always kind;

  He holds us all within his mind.

  On his back all vows are made;

  He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.

  He loves the land and loves the sea,

  And even loves a child like me.”

  Then he left her, moving swiftly and cleanly, not looking back. She sat on the bench and watched him wait with the others clustered on the corner for the WALK light, dien cross with them, the leather bag slung over his shoulder bouncing lightly against his hip. She watched him mount the steps of 2 Hammarskjold Plaza and disappear inside. Then she leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the voices sing. At some point she realized that at least two of the words they were singing were the ones that made her name.

  FIVE

  It seemed to Roland that great multitudes of folken were streaming into the building, but this was the perception of a man who had spent the latter years of his quest in mostly deserted places.

  If he’d come at quarter to nine, while people were still arriving, instead of at quarter to eleven, he would have been stunned by the flood of bodies. Now most of those who worked here were settled in their offices and cubicles, generating paper and bytes of information.

  The lobby windows were of clear glass and at least two stories high, perhaps three. Consequently the lobby was full of light, and as he stepped inside, the grief that had possessed him ever since kneeling by Eddie in the street of Pleasantville slipped away. In here the singing voices were louder, not a chorus but a great choir. And, he saw, he wasn’t the only one who heard them. On the street, people had been hurrying with their heads down and looks of distracted concentration on their faces, as if they were deliberately not seeing the delicate and perishable beauty of the day which had been given them; in here they were helpless not to feel at least some of that to which the gunslinger was so exquisitely attuned, and which he drank like water in the desert.

  As if in a dream, he drifted across the rose-marble tile, hearing the echoing clack of his bootheels, hearing the faint and shifting conversation of the Orizas in their pouch. He thought, People who loork here wish they lived here. They may not know it, exactly, but they do. People who work here find excuses to work late.

  And they will live long and productive lives.

  In the eenter of the high, echoing room, the expensive marble floor gave way to a square of humble dark earth. It was surrounded by ropes of wine-dark velvet, but Roland knew that even die ropes didn’t need to be there. No one would transgress that litde garden, not even a suicidal can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were diree dwarf palm trees, and plants he hadn’t seen since leaving Gilead:

  Spathiphyllum, he believed they had been called there, although they might not have the same name in this world.

  There were other plants as well, but only one mattered.

  In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose.

  It hadn’t been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in 1977, when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled witfi trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced die coming of Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate Associates. This building, all one hundred stories of it, had been built instead, and around the rose. Whatever business might be done here was secondary to that purpose.

  Hammarskjold Plaza was a shrine.

  SIX

  There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he drew glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself.

  Not for years-perhaps since his early teenage years-had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-tapping distance of him without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he surely should have-

  The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had approached him was clearly surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back from the ceiling above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman’s green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in them, but still, first to be surprised, then to miss like that-

  He glanced down at the woman’s feet and got at least part of the answer. She was wearing a kind of shoe he’d never seen before, something with deep foam soles and what might have been canvas uppers. Shoes that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface. As for the woman herself-

  A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that he had “seen the boat she came in,” as familial resemblance was sometimes expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis; second, that a society of gunslingers was a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone World, and he had just been accosted by one of them.

  And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?

  “I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,”

  Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”

  The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away,
as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him… although I can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain.

  There’s a person who wants…” For a moment she looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “… a person who wants to play with you,” she finished.

  “All right,” he said.

  She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”

  Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”

  “I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.”

  And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor-not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.

  At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faindy familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ diere, and easily.

  When he had finished, it changed back again.

  “A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”

  She smiled-her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff-and nodded. ’Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”

  “Say true?”

  “True.”

  The lobby had regained its normal rhythm… except, Roland understood, die rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned die nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to.

  They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew i t… which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called ele-vaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfecdy straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old.

  And it didn’t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.

  “Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”

  “Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”

  SEVEN

  The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone.

  He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of die Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States.

  It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”

  “Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her.

  “Surely not, you’re too young. His granddaughter?”

  Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain.

  I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who mosdy raised me.”

  “Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.

  “As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning. “Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A litde frightened, but pleased.”

  Roland shook her hand, but the gesture was perfunctory, hardly more than a touch. Then, with considerably more feeling

  (for this was the ritual he had grown up with, the one he understood), he placed his fist against his forehead and made a leg. “Long days and pleasant nights, Nancy Deepneau.”

  Her smile widened into a cheerful grin. “And may you have twice the number, Roland of Gilead! May you have twice the number.”

  The ele-vaydor came, they got on, and it was to the ninetyninth floor that they went.

  EIGHT

  The doors opened on a large round foyer. The floor was carpeted in a dusky pink shade that exacdy matched the hue of the rose. Across from the ele-vaydor was a glass door with THE TET CORPORATION lettered on it. Beyond, Roland saw another, smaller lobby where a woman sat at a desk, apparendy talking to herself. To the right of the outer lobby door were two men wearing business suits. They were chatting to each other, hands in pockets, seemingly relaxed, but Roland saw they were anything but. And they were armed. The coats of their suits were welltailored, but a man who knows how to look for a gun usually sees one, if a gun is there. These two fellows would stand in this foyer for an hour, maybe two (it was difficult for even good men to remain totally alert for much longer), falling into their little justchatting routine each time the ele-vaydor came, ready to move instandy if they smelled something wrong. Roland approved.

  He didn’t spend much time looking at the guards, however.

  Once he had identified them for what they were, he let his gaze go where it had wanted to be from the moment the ele-vaydor doors opened. There was a large black-and-white picture on the wall to his left. This was a photograph (he had originally thought the word was fottergraf) about five feet long and three wide, mounted without a frame, curved so cunningly to the shape of the wall diat it looked like a hole into some unnaturally still reality. Three men in jeans and open-necked shirts sat on the top rail of a fence, their boots hooked under the lowest rail.

  How many times, Roland wondered, had he seen cowboys or pastorillas sitting just that way while they watched branding, roping, gelding, or the breaking of wild horses? How many times had he sat so himself, sometimes with one or more of his old tet-Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie DeCurry-sitting to either side of him, as John Cullum and Aaron Deepneau sat flanking the black man with the gold-rimmed spectacles and the tiny white moustache? The remembering made him ache, and this was no mere ache of the mind; his stomach clenched and his heart sped up. The three in the picture had been caught laughing at something, and the result was a kind of timeless perfection, one of those rare moments when men are glad to be what they are and where they are.

  “The Founding Fathers,” Nancy said. She sounded both amused and sad. “That photo was taken on an executive retreat in 1986. Taos, New Mexico. Three city boys in cow country, how about that. And don’t they look like they’re having the time of their lives?”

  “You
say true,” Roland said.

  “Do you know all three?”

  Roland nodded. He knew them, all right, although he had never met Moses Carver, the man in the middle. Dan Holmes’s partner, Odetta Holmes’s godfather. In the picture he looked to be a robust and healthy seventy, but surely by 1986 he had to be closer to eighty. Perhaps eighty-five. Of course, Roland reminded himself, there was a wild card here: the marvelous thing he’d just seen in the lobby of this building. The rose was no more a fountain of youth than the turtle in the little pocket park across the street was the real Maturin, but did he think it had certain beneficent qualities? Yes he did. Certain healing qualities? Yes he did. Did he believe that the nine years of life Aaron Deepneau had gotten between 1977 and the taking of this picture in 1986 had just been a matter of the /-torn-replacing pills and medical treatments of the old people? No he did not.

  These three men-Carver, Cullum, and Deepneau-had come togetiier, almost magically, to fight for the rose in their old age.

  Their tale, the gunslinger believed, would make a book in itself, very likely a fine and exciting one. What Roland believed was simplicity itself: the rose had shown its gratitude.

  “When did they die?” he asked Nancy Deepneau.

  “John Cullum went first, in 1989,” she said. “Victim of a gunshot wound. He lasted twelve hours in the hospital, long enough for everyone to say goodbye. He was in New York for the annual board meeting. According to the NYPD, it was a streetside mugging gone bad. We believe he was killed by an agent of either Sombra or North Central Positronics. Probably one of the can-toi. There were other attempts that missed.”

  “Both Sombra and Positronics come to the same thing,”

  said Roland. “They’re the agencies of the Crimson King in this world.”

  “We know,” she said, then pointed to the man on the left side of the picture, the one she so strongly resembled. “Uncle Aaron lived until 1992. When you met him… in 1977?”