by Stephen King
“They left the ‘Jr.’ off the author’s name, didn’t they?”
“Yes! Yes!” Tower was almost hugging himself. “As if the book had actually been written by the author’s father! In fact, once when I was at a bibliographic convention in Philadelphia, I explained this book’s particular situation to an attorney who gave a lecture on copyright law, and this guy said that Slightman Jr.’s father might actually be able to assert right of ownership over this book because of a simple typographical error! Amazing, don’t you think?”
“Totally,” Eddie said, thinking Slightman the Elder. Thinking Slightman the Younger. Thinking about how Jake had become fast friends with the latter and wondering why this gave him such a bad feeling now, sitting here and drinking coffee in little old Calla New York.
At least he took the Ruger, Eddie thought.
“Are you telling me that’s all it takes to make a book valuable?” he asked Tower. “One misprint on the cover, a couple more inside, and all at once the thing’s worth seventy-five hundred bucks?”
“Not at all,” Tower said, looking shocked. “But Mr. Slightman wrote three really excellent Western novels, all taking the Indians’ point of view. The Hogan is the middle one. He became a big bug in Montana after the war—some job having to do with water and mineral rights—and then, here is the irony, a group of Indians killed him. Scalped him, actually. They were drinking outside a general store—”
A general store named Took’s, Eddie thought. I’d bet my watch and warrant on it.
“—and apparently Mr. Slightman said something they took objection to, and…well, there goes your ballgame.”
“Do all your really valuable books have similar stories?” Eddie asked. “I mean, some sort of coincidence makes them valuable, and not just the stories themselves?”
Tower laughed. “Young man, most people who collect rare books won’t even open their purchases. Opening and closing a book damages the spine. Hence damaging the resale price.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as slightly sick behavior?”
“Not at all,” Tower said, but a telltale red blush was climbing his cheeks. Part of him apparently took Eddie’s point. “If a customer spends eight thousand dollars for a signed first edition of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it makes perfect sense to put that book away in a safe place where it can be admired but not touched. If the fellow actually wants to read the story, let him buy a Vintage paperback.”
“You believe that,” Eddie said, fascinated. “You actually believe that.”
“Well…yes. Books can be objects of great value. That value is created in different ways. Sometimes just the author’s signature is enough to do it. Sometimes—as in this case—it’s a misprint. Sometimes it’s a first print-run—a first edition—that’s extremely small. And does any of this have to do with why you came here, Mr. Dean? Is it what you wanted to…to palaver about?”
“No, I suppose not.” But what exactly had he wanted to palaver about? He’d known—it had all been perfectly clear to him as he’d herded Andolini and Biondi out of the back room, then stood in the doorway watching them stagger to the Town Car, supporting each other. Even in cynical, mind-your-own-business New York, they had drawn plenty of looks. Both of them had been bleeding, and both had had the same stunned What the hell HAPPENED to me? look in their eyes. Yes, then it had been clear. The book—and the name of the author—had muddied up his thinking again. He took it from Tower and set it facedown on the counter so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Then he went to work regathering his thoughts.
“The first and most important thing, Mr. Tower, is that you have to get out of New York until July fifteenth. Because they’ll be back. Probably not those guys specifically, but some of the other guys Balazar uses. And they’ll be more eager than ever to teach you and me a lesson. Balazar’s a despot.” This was a word Eddie had learned from Susannah—she had used it to describe the Tick-Tock Man. “His way of doing business is to always escalate. You slap him, he slaps back twice as hard. Punch him in the nose, he breaks your jaw. You toss a grenade, he tosses a bomb.”
Tower groaned. It was a theatrical sound (although probably not meant that way), and under other circumstances, Eddie might have laughed. Not under these. Besides, everything he’d wanted to say to Tower was coming back to him. He could do this dicker, by God. He would do this dicker.
“Me they probably won’t be able to get at. I’ve got business elsewhere. Over the hills and far away, may ya say so. Your job is to make sure they won’t be able to get at you, either.”
“But surely…after what you just did…and even if they didn’t believe you about the women and children…” Tower’s eyes, wide behind his crooked spectacles, begged Eddie to say that he had really not been serious about creating enough corpses to fill Grand Army Plaza. Eddie couldn’t help him there.
“Cal, listen. Guys like Balazar don’t believe or disbelieve. What they do is test the limits. Did I scare Big Nose? No, just knocked him out. Did I scare Jack? Yes. And it’ll stick, because Jack’s got a little bit of imagination. Will Balazar be impressed that I scared Ugly Jack? Yes…but just enough to be cautious.”
Eddie leaned over the counter, looking at Tower earnestly.
“I don’t want to kill kids, okay? Let’s get that straight. In…well, in another place, let’s leave it at that, in another place me and my friends are going to put our lives on the line to save kids. But they’re human kids. People like Jack and Tricks Postino and Balazar himself, they’re animals. Wolves on two legs. And do wolves raise human beings? No, they raise more wolves. Do male wolves mate with human women? No, they mate with female wolves. So if I had to go in there—and I would if I had to—I’d tell myself I was cleaning out a pack of wolves, right down to the smallest cub. No more than that. And no less.”
“My God he means it,” Tower said. He spoke low, and all in a breath, and to the thin air.
“I absolutely do, but it’s neither here nor there,” Eddie said. “The point is, they’ll come after you. Not to kill you, but to turn you around in their direction again. If you stay here, Cal, I think you can look forward to a serious maiming at the very least. Is there a place you can go until the fifteenth of next month? Do you have enough money? I don’t have any, but I guess I could get some.”
In his mind, Eddie was already in Brooklyn. Balazar guardian-angeled a poker game in the back room of Bernie’s Barber Shop, everybody knew that. The game might not be going on during a weekday, but there’d be somebody back there with cash. Enough to—
“Aaron has some money,” Tower was saying reluctantly. “He’s offered a good many times. I’ve always told him no. He’s also always telling me I need to go on a vacation. I think by this he means I should get away from the fellows you just turned out. He is curious about what they want, but he doesn’t ask. A hothead, but a gentleman hothead.” Tower smiled briefly. “Perhaps Aaron and I could go on a vacation together, young sir. After all, we might not get another chance.”
Eddie was pretty sure the chemo and radiation treatments were going to keep Aaron Deepneau up and on his feet for at least another four years, but this was probably not the time to say so. He looked toward the door of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind and saw the other door. Beyond it was the mouth of the cave. Sitting there like a comic-strip yogi, just a cross-legged silhouette, was the gunslinger. Eddie wondered how long he’d been gone over there, how long Roland had been listening to the muffled but still maddening sound of the todash chimes.
“Would Atlantic City be far enough, do you think?” Tower asked timidly.
Eddie Dean almost shuddered at the thought. He had a brief vision of two plump sheep—getting on in years, yes, but still quite tasty—wandering into not just a pack of wolves but a whole city of them.
“Not there,” Eddie said. “Anyplace but there.”
“What about Maine or New Hampshire? Perhaps we could rent a cottage on a lake somewhere until t
he fifteenth of July.”
Eddie nodded. He was a city boy. It was hard for him to imagine the bad guys way up in northern New England, wearing those checkered caps and down vests as they chomped their pepper sandwiches and drank their Ruffino. “That’d be better,” he said. “And while you’re there, you might see if you could find a lawyer.”
Tower burst out laughing. Eddie looked at him, head cocked, smiling a little himself. It was always good to make folks laugh, but it was better when you knew what the fuck they were laughing at.
“I’m sorry,” Tower said after a moment or two. “It’s just that Aaron was a lawyer. His sister and two brothers, all younger, are still lawyers. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the entire United States. It reads simply ‘DEEPNEAU.’ “
“That speeds things up,” Eddie said. “I want you to have Mr. Deepneau draw up a contract while you’re vacationing in New England—”
“Hiding in New England,” Tower said. He suddenly looked morose. “Holed up in New England.”
“Call it whatcha wanna,” Eddie said, “but get that paper drawn up. You’re going to sell that lot to me and my friends. To the Tet Corporation. You’re just gonna get a buck to start with, but I can almost guarantee you that in the end you’ll get fair market value.”
He had more to say, lots, but stopped there. When he’d held his hand out for the book, The Dogan or The Hogan or whatever it was, an expression of miserly reluctance had come over Tower’s face. What made the look unpleasant was the undercurrent of stupidity in it…and not very far under, either. Oh God, he’s gonna fight me on this. After everything that’s happened, he’s still gonna fight me on it. And why? Because he really is a packrat.
“You can trust me, Cal,” he said, knowing trust was not exactly the issue. “I set my watch and warrant on it. Hear me, now. Hear me, I beg.”
“I don’t know you from Adam. You walk in off the street—”
“—and save your life, don’t forget that part.”
Tower’s face grew set and stubborn. “They weren’t going to kill me. You said that yourself.”
“They were gonna burn your favorite books. Your most valuable ones.”
“Not my most valuable. Also, that might have been a bluff.”
Eddie took a deep breath and let it out, hoping his suddenly strong desire to lean across the counter and sink his fingers into Tower’s fat throat would depart or at least subside. He reminded himself that if Tower hadn’t been stubborn, he probably would have sold the lot to Sombra long before now. The rose would have been plowed under. And the Dark Tower? Eddie had an idea that when the rose died, the Dark Tower would simply fall like the one in Babel when God had gotten tired of it and wiggled His finger. No waiting around another hundred or thousand years for the machinery running the Beams to quit. Just ashes, ashes, we all fall down. And then? Hail the Crimson King, lord of todash darkness.
“Cal, if you sell me and my friends your vacant lot, you’re off the hook. Not only that, but you’ll eventually have enough money to run your little shop for the rest of your life.” He had a sudden thought. “Hey, do you know a company called Holmes Dental?”
Tower smiled. “Who doesn’t? I use their floss. And their toothpaste. I tried the mouthwash, but it’s too strong. Why do you ask?”
“Because Odetta Holmes is my wife. I may look like Froggy the Gremlin, but in truth I’m Prince Fuckin Charming.”
Tower was quiet for a long time. Eddie curbed his impatience and let the man think. At last Tower said, “You think I’m being foolish. That I’m being Silas Marner, or worse, Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Eddie didn’t know who Silas Marner was, but he took Tower’s point from the context of the discussion. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “After what you’ve just been through, you’re too smart not to know where your best interests lie.”
“I feel obligated to tell you that this isn’t just mindless miserliness on my part; there’s an element of caution, as well. I know that piece of New York is valuable, any piece of Manhattan is, but it’s not just that. I have a safe out back. There’s something in it. Something perhaps even more valuable than my copy of Ulysses.”
“Then why isn’t it in your safe-deposit box?”
“Because it’s supposed to be here,” Tower said. “It’s always been here. Perhaps waiting for you, or someone like you. Once, Mr. Dean, my family owned almost all of Turtle Bay, and…well, wait. Will you wait?”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
What choice?
Eleven
When Tower was gone, Eddie got off the stool and went to the door only he could see. He looked through it. Dimly, he could hear chimes. More clearly he could hear his mother. “Why don’t you get out of there?” she called dolorously. “You’ll only make things worse, Eddie—you always do.”
That’s my Ma, he thought, and called the gunslinger’s name.
Roland pulled one of the bullets from his ear. Eddie noted the oddly clumsy way he handled it—almost pawing at it, as if his fingers were stiff—but there was no time to think about it now.
“Are you all right?” Eddie called.
“Do fine. And you?”
“Yeah, but…Roland, can you come through? I might need a little help.”
Roland considered, then shook his head. “The box might close if I did. Probably would close. Then the door would close. And we’d be trapped on that side.”
“Can’t you prop the damn thing open with a stone or a bone or something?”
“No,” Roland said. “It wouldn’t work. The ball is powerful.”
And it’s working on you, Eddie thought. Roland’s face looked haggard, the way it had when the lobstrosities’ poison had been inside him.
“All right,” he said.
“Be as quick as you can.”
“I will.”
Twelve
When he turned around, Tower was looking at him quizzically. “Who were you talking to?”
Eddie stood aside and pointed at the doorway. “Do you see anything there, sai?”
Calvin Tower looked, started to shake his head, then looked longer. “A shimmer,” he said at last. “Like hot air over an incinerator. Who’s there? What’s there?”
“For the time being, let’s say nobody. What have you got in your hand?”
Tower held it up. It was an envelope, very old. Written on it in copperplate were the words Stefan Toren and Dead Letter. Below, carefully drawn in ancient ink, were the same symbols that were on the door and the box: . Now we might be getting somewhere, Eddie thought.
“Once this envelope held the will of my great-great-great grandfather,” Calvin Tower said. “It was dated March 19th, 1846. Now there’s nothing but a single piece of paper with a name written upon it. If you can tell me what that name is, young man, I’ll do as you ask.”
And so, Eddie mused, it comes down to another riddle. Only this time it wasn’t four lives that hung upon the answer, but all of existence.
Thank God it’s an easy one, he thought.
“It’s Deschain,” Eddie said. “The first name will be either Roland, the name of my dinh, or Steven, the name of his father.”
All the blood seemed to fall out of Calvin Tower’s face. Eddie had no idea how the man was able to keep his feet. “My dear God in heaven,” he said.
With trembling fingers, he removed an ancient and brittle piece of paper from the envelope, a time traveler that had voyaged over a hundred and thirty-one years to this where and when. It was folded. Tower opened it and put it on the counter, where they could both read the words Stefan Toren had written in the same firm copperplate hand:
Roland Deschain, of Gilead
The line of ELD
GUNSLINGER
Thirteen
There was more talk, about fifteen minutes’ worth, and Eddie supposed at least some of it was important, but the real deal had gone d
own when he’d told Tower the name his three-times-great-grandfather had written on a slip of paper fourteen years before the Civil War got rolling.
What Eddie had discovered about Tower during their palaver was dismaying. He harbored some respect for the man (for any man who could hold out for more than twenty seconds against Balazar’s goons), but didn’t like him much. There was a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie thought it was self-created and maybe propped up by his analyst, who would tell him about how he had to take care of himself, how he had to be the captain of his own ship, the author of his own destiny, respect his own desires, all that blah-blah. All the little code words and terms that meant it was all right to be a selfish fuck. That it was noble, even. When Tower told Eddie that Aaron Deepneau was his only friend, Eddie wasn’t surprised. What surprised him was that Tower had any friends at all. Such a man could never be ka-tet, and it made Eddie uneasy to know that their destinies were so tightly bound together.
You’ll just have to trust to ka. It’s what ka’s for, isn’t it?
Sure it was, but Eddie didn’t have to like it.
Fourteen
Eddie asked if Tower had a ring with Ex Liveris on it. Tower looked puzzled, then laughed and told Eddie he must mean Ex Libris. He rummaged on one of his shelves, found a book, showed Eddie the plate in front. Eddie nodded.
“No,” Tower said. “But it’d be just the thing for a guy like me, wouldn’t it?” He looked at Eddie keenly. “Why do you ask?”
But Tower’s future responsibility to save a man now exploring the hidden highways of multiple Americas was a subject Eddie didn’t feel like getting into right now. He’d come as close to blowing the guy’s mind as he wanted to, and he had to get back through the unfound door before Black Thirteen wore Roland away to a frazzle.
“Never mind. But if you see one, you ought to pick it up. One more thing and then I’m gone.”
“What’s that?”
“I want your promise that as soon as I leave, you’ll leave.”
Tower once more grew shifty. It was the side of him Eddie knew he could come to outright loathe, given time. “Why…to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can do that. Early evenings are often a very busy time for me…people are much more prone to browse once the workday’s over…and Mr. Brice is coming in to look at a first of The Troubled Air, Irwin Shaw’s novel about radio and the McCarthy era…I’ll have to at least skim through my appointment calendar, and…”