by Stephen King
“Good idea, too,” Eddie said. “One step below devil grass, and the Surgeon General says thankya. But you’ll sell it to me, won’t you, sai? Our dinh enjoys a smoke in the evening, while he’s planning out new ways to help folks in need.”
There were a few titters at this. The store had begun to fill up quite amazingly. They were playing to a real audience now, and Eddie didn’t mind a bit. Took was coming off as a shithead, which wasn’t surprising. Took clearly was a shithead.
“Never seen no one dance a better commala than he did!” a man called from one of the aisles, and there were murmurs of assent.
“Say thankya,” Eddie said. “I’ll pass it on.”
“And your lady sings well,” said another.
Susannah dropped a skirtless curtsy. She finished her own shopping by pushing the lid a little further off the pickle barrel and dipping out an enormous specimen with the tongs. Eddie leaned close and said, “I might have gotten something that green from my nose once, but I can’t really remember.”
“Don’t be grotesque, dear one,” Susannah replied, smiling sweetly all the while.
Eddie and Jake were content to let her assume responsibility for the dickering, which Susannah did with relish. Took tried his very best to overcharge her for their gunna, but Eddie had an idea this wasn’t aimed at them specifically but was just part of what Eben Took saw as his job (or perhaps his sacred calling). Certainly he was smart enough to gauge the temperature of his clientele, for he had pretty much laid off nagging them by the time the trading was finished. This did not keep him from ringing their coins on a special square of metal which seemed reserved for that sole purpose, and holding Jake’s garnets up to the light and rejecting one of them (which looked like all the others, so far as Eddie, Jake, and Susannah could see).
“How long’ll ’ee be here, folks?” he asked in a marginally cordial voice when the dickering was done. Yet his eyes were shrewd, and Eddie had no doubt that whatever they said would reach the ears of Eisenhart, Overholser, and anyone else who mattered before the day was done.
“Ah, well, that depends on what we see,” Eddie said. “And what we see depends on what folks show us, wouldn’t you say?”
“Aye,” Took agreed, but he looked mystified. There were now perhaps fifty people in the roomy mercantile-and-grocery, most of them simply gawking. There was a powdery sort of excitement in the air. Eddie liked it. He didn’t know if that was right or wrong, but yes, he liked it very well.
“Also depends on what folks want,” Susannah amplified.
“Ah’ll tell you what they ’unt, brownie!” Took said in his shrill shards-of-glass voice. “They ’unt peace, same as ever! They ’unt t’town t’still be here arter you four—”
Susannah seized the man’s thumb and bent it back. It was dextrously done. Jake doubted if more than two or three folken, those closest to the counter, saw it, but Took’s face went a dirty white and his eyes bulged from their sockets.
“I’ll take that word from an old man who’s lost most of his sense,” she said, “but I won’t take it from you. Call me brownie again, fatso, and I’ll pull your tongue out of your head and wipe your ass with it.”
“Cry pardon!” Took gasped. Now sweat broke on his cheeks in large and rather disgusting drops. “Cry’er pardon, so Ah do!”
“Fine,” Susannah said, and let him go. “Now we might just go out and sit on your porch for a bit, for shopping’s tiring work.”
Six
Took’s General Store featured no Guardians of the Beam such as Roland had told of in Mejis, but rockers were lined up the long length of the porch, as many as two dozen of them. And all three sets of steps were flanked by stuffy-guys in honor of the season. When Roland’s ka-mates came out, they took three rockers in the middle of the porch. Oy lay down contentedly between Jake’s feet and appeared to go to sleep with his nose on his paws.
Eddie cocked a thumb back over his shoulder in Eben Took’s general direction. “Too bad Detta Walker wasn’t here to shoplift a few things from the son of a bitch.”
“Don’t think I wasn’t tempted on her behalf,” Susannah said.
“Folks coming,” Jake said. “I think they want to talk to us.”
“Sure they do,” Eddie said. “It’s what we’re here for.” He smiled, his handsome face growing handsomer still. Under his breath he said, “Meet the gunslingers, folks. Come-come-commala, shootin’s gonna folla.”
“Hesh up that bad mouth of yours, son,” Susannah said, but she was laughing.
They’re crazy, Jake thought. But if he was the exception, why was he laughing, too?
Seven
Henchick of the Manni and Roland of Gilead nooned in the shadow of a massive rock outcrop, eating cold chicken and rice wrapped in tortillas and drinking sof’ cider from a jug which they passed back and forth between them. Henchick set them on with a word to what he called both The Force and The Over, then fell silent. That was fine with Roland. The old man had answered aye to the one question the gunslinger had needed to ask.
By the time they’d finished their meal, the sun had gone behind the high cliffs and escarpments. Thus they walked in shadow, making their way up a path that was strewn with rubble and far too narrow for their horses, which had been left in a grove of yellow-leaf quaking aspen below. Scores of tiny lizards ran before them, sometimes darting into cracks in the rocks.
Shady or not, it was hotter than the hinges of hell out here. After a mile of steady climbing, Roland began to breathe hard and use his bandanna to wipe the sweat from his cheeks and throat. Henchick, who appeared to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty, walked ahead of him with steady serenity. He breathed with the ease of a man strolling in a park. He’d left his cloak below, laid over the branch of a tree, but Roland could see no patches of sweat spreading on his black shirt.
They reached a bend in the path, and for a moment the world to the north and west opened out below them in gauzy splendor. Roland could see the huge taupe rectangles of graze-land, and tiny toy cattle. To the south and east, the fields grew greener as they marched toward the river lowlands. He could see the Calla village, and even—in the dreaming western distance—the edge of great forest through which they had come to get here. The breeze that struck them on this stretch of the path was so cold it made Roland gasp. Yet he raised his face into it gratefully, eyes mostly closed, smelling all the things that were the Calla: steers, horses, grain, river water, and rice rice rice.
Henchick had doffed his broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat and also stood with his head raised and his eyes mostly closed, a study in silent thanksgiving. The wind blew back his long hair and playfully divided his waist-length beard into forks. They stood so for perhaps three minutes, letting the breeze cool them. Then Henchick clapped his hat back on his head. He looked at Roland. “Do’ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?”
Roland considered this. “Neither,” he said at last. “I think in darkness.”
“Do’ee say so?”
“Aye.”
Henchick considered a moment, then turned to continue on up the path. Roland was impatient to get to where they were going, but he touched the Manni’s shoulder, nevertheless. A promise was a promise. Especially one made to a lady.
“I stayed with one of the forgetful last night,” Roland said. “Isn’t that what you call those who choose to leave thy ka-tet?”
“We speak of the forgetful, aye,” Henchick said, watching him closely, “but not of ka-tet. We know that word, but it is not our word, gunslinger.”
“In any case, I—”
“In any case, thee slept at the Rocking B with Vaughn Eisenhart and our daughter, Margaret. And she threw the dish for’ee. I didn’t speak of these things when we talked last night, for I knew them as well as you did. Any ro’, we had other matters to discuss, did we not? Caves, and such.”
“We did.” Roland tried not to show his surprise. He must have failed, be
cause Henchick nodded slightly, the lips just visible within his beard curving in a slight smile.
“The Manni have ways of knowing, gunslinger; always have.”
“Will you not call me Roland?”
“Nay.”
“She said to tell thee that Margaret of the Redpath Clan does fine with her heathen man, fine still.”
Henchick nodded. If he felt pain at this, it didn’t show. Not even in his eyes. “She’s damned,” he said. His tone was that of a man saying Looks like it might come off sunny by afternoon.
“Are you asking me to tell her that?” Roland asked. He was amused and aghast at the same time.
Henchick’s blue eyes had faded and grown watery with age, but there was no mistaking the surprise that came into them at this question. His bushy eyebrows went up. “Why would I bother?” he asked. “She knows. She’ll have time to repent her heathen man at leisure in the depths of Na’ar. She knows that, too. Come, gunslinger. Another quarter-wheel and we’re there. But it’s upsy.”
Eight
Upsy it was, very upsy indeed. Half an hour later, they came to a place where a fallen boulder blocked most of the path. Henchick eased his way around it, dark pants rippling in the wind, beard blowing out sideways, long-nailed fingers clutching for purchase. Roland followed. The boulder was warm from the sun, but the wind was now so cold he was shivering. He sensed the heels of his worn boots sticking out over a blue drop of perhaps two thousand feet. If the old man decided to push him, all would end in a hurry. And in decidedly undramatic fashion.
But it wouldn’t, he thought. Eddie would carry on in my place, and the other two would follow until they fell.
On the far side of the boulder, the path ended in a ragged, dark hole nine feet high and five wide. A draft blew out of it into Roland’s face. Unlike the breeze that had played with them as they climbed the path, this air was smelly and unpleasant. Coming with it, carried upon it, were cries Roland couldn’t make out. But they were the cries of human voices.
“Is it the cries of folks in Na’ar we’re hearing?” he asked Henchick.
No smile touched the old man’s mostly hidden lips now. “Speak not in jest,” he said. “Not here. For you are in the presence of the infinite.”
Roland could believe it. He moved forward cautiously, boots gritting on the rubbly scree, his hand dropping to the butt of his gun—he always wore the left one now, when he wore any; below the hand that was whole.
The stench breathing from the cave’s open mouth grew stronger yet. Noxious if not outright toxic. Roland held his bandanna against his mouth and nose with his diminished right hand. Something inside the cave, there in the shadows. Bones, yes, the bones of lizards and other small animals, but something else as well, a shape he knew—
“Be careful, gunslinger,” Henchick said, but stood aside to let Roland enter the cave if he so desired.
My desires don’t matter, Roland thought. This is just something I have to do. Probably that makes it simpler.
The shape in the shadows grew clearer. He wasn’t surprised to see it was a door exactly like those he’d come to on the beach; why else would this have been called Doorway Cave? It was made of ironwood (or perhaps ghostwood), and stood about twenty feet inside the entrance to the cave. It was six and a half feet high, as the doors on the beach had been. And, like those, it stood freely in the shadows, with hinges that seemed fastened to nothing.
Yet it would turn on those hinges easily, he thought. Will turn. When the time comes.
There was no keyhole. The knob appeared to be crystal. Etched upon it was a rose. On the beach of the Western Sea, the three doors had been marked with the High Speech: THE PRISONER on one, THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS on another, THE PUSHER on the third. Here were the hieroglyphs he had seen on the box hidden in Callahan’s church:
“It means ‘unfound,’ ” Roland said.
Henchick nodded, but when Roland moved to walk around the door, the old man took a step forward and held out a hand. “Be careful, or’ee may be able to discover who those voices belong to for yourself.”
Roland saw what he meant. Eight or nine feet beyond the door, the floor of the cave sloped down at an angle of fifty or even sixty degrees. There was nothing to hold onto, and the rock looked smooth as glass. Thirty feet down, this slippery-slide disappeared into a chasm. Moaning, intertwined voices rose from it. And then one came clear. It was that of Gabrielle Deschain.
“Roland, don’t!” his dead mother shrieked up from the darkness. “Don’t shoot, it’s me! It’s your m—” But before she could finish, the overlapping crash of pistol shots silenced her. Pain shot up into Roland’s head. He was pressing the bandanna against his face almost hard enough to break his own nose. He tried to ease the muscles in his arm and at first was unable to do so.
Next from that reeking darkness came the voice of his father.
“I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius,” Steven Deschain said in a tired voice, “but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods!”
Never mind. These are not even ghosts. I think they’re only echoes, somehow taken from deep inside my own head and projected.
When he stepped around the door (minding the drop now to his right), the door was gone. There was only the silhouette of Henchick, a severe man-shape cut from black paper standing in the cave’s mouth.
The door’s still there, but you can only see it from one side. And in that way it’s like the other doors, too.
“A trifle upsetting, isn’t it?” tittered the voice of Walter from deep in the Doorway Cave’s gullet. “Give it over, Roland! Better to give it over and die than to discover the room at the top of the Dark Tower is empty.”
Then came the urgent blare of Eld’s Horn, raising gooseflesh on Roland’s arms and hackles on the back of his neck: Cuthbert Allgood’s final battle-cry as he ran down Jericho Hill toward his death at the hands of the barbarians with the blue faces.
Roland lowered the bandanna from his own face and began walking again. One pace; two; three. Bones crunched beneath his bootheels. At the third pace the door reappeared, at first side-to, with its latch seeming to bite into thin air, like the hinges on its other side. He stopped for a moment, gazing at this thickness, relishing the strangeness of the door just as he had relished the strangeness of the ones he’d encountered on the beach. And on the beach he had been sick almost to the point of death. If he moved his head forward slightly, the door disappeared. If he pulled it back again, it was there. The door never wavered, never shimmered. It was always a case of either/or, there/not there.
He stepped all the way back, put his splayed palms on the ironwood, leaned on them. He could feel a faint but perceptible vibration, like the feel of powerful machinery. From the dark gullet of the cave, Rhea of the Cöos screamed up at him, calling him a brat who’d never seen his true father’s face, telling him his bit o’ tail burst her throat with her screams as she burned. Roland ignored it and grasped the crystal doorknob.
“Nay, gunslinger, ye dare not!” Henchick cried in alarm.
“I dare,” Roland said. And he did, but the knob wouldn’t turn in either direction. He stepped back from it.
“But the door was open when you found the priest?” he asked Henchick. They had spoken of this the previous night, but Roland wanted to hear more.
“Aye. ’Twas I and Jemmin who found him. Thee knows we elder Manni seek the other worlds? Not for treasure but for enlightenment?”
Roland nodded. He also knew that some had come back from their travels insane. Others never came back at all.
“These hills are magnetic, and riddled with many ways into many worlds. We’d gone out to a cave near the old garnet mines and there we found a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“ ’Twas a machine set in the cave’s mouth,” Henchick said. “Push a button and a voice came out of it. The voice told
us to come here.”
“You knew of this cave before?”
“Aye, but before the Pere came, it were called the Cave of Voices. For which reason thee now knows.”
Roland nodded and motioned for Henchick to go on.
“The voice from the machine spoke in accents like those of your ka-mates, gunslinger. It said that we should come here, Jemmin and I, and we’d find a door and a man and a wonder. So we did.”
“Someone left you instructions,” Roland mused. It was Walter he was thinking of. The man in black, who had also left them the cookies Eddie called Keeblers. Walter was Flagg and Flagg was Marten and Marten…was he Maerlyn, the old rogue wizard of legend? On that subject Roland remained unsure. “And spoke to you by name?”
“Nay, he did not know s’much. Only called us the Manni-folk.”
“How did this someone know where to leave the voice machine, do you think?”
Henchick’s lips thinned. “Why must thee think it was a person? Why not a god speaking in a man’s voice? Why not some agent of The Over?”
Roland said, “Gods leave siguls. Men leave machines.” He paused. “In my own experience, of course, Pa.”
Henchick made a curt gesture, as if to tell Roland to spare him the flattery.
“Was it general knowledge that thee and thy friend were exploring the cave where you found the speaking machine?”
Henchick shrugged rather sullenly. “People see us, I suppose. Some mayhap watch over the miles with their spyglasses and binoculars. Also, there’s the mechanical man. He sees much and prattles everlastingly to all who will listen.”
Roland took this for a yes. He thought someone had known Pere Callahan was coming. And that he would need help when he arrived on the outskirts of the Calla.
“How far open was the door?” Roland asked.
“These are questions for Callahan,” Henchick said. “I promised to show thee this place. I have. Surely that’s enough for ye.”