by Stephen King
“What are those?” Eddie asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. Go on.”
Ted shrugged, as if to say What else do you need?
“Absolutely astral sex, for one thing,” Dinky said. “It’s sim, but it’s still incredible — I made it with Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Nicole Kidman all in one week.” He said this with a certain uneasy pride. “I could have had them all at the same time if I’d wanted to. The only way you can tell they’re not real is to breathe directly on them, from close up. When you do, the part you blow on … kinda disappears. It’s unsettling.”
“Booze? Dope?” Eddie asked.
“Booze in limited quantities,” Ted replied. “If you’re into oenology, for instance, you’ll experience fresh wonders at every meal.”
“What’s oenology?” Jake asked.
“The science of wine-snobbery, sugarbun,” Susannah said.
“If you come to Blue Heaven addicted to something,” Dinky said, “they get you off it. Kindly. The one or two guys who proved especially tough nuts in that area …” His eyes met Ted’s briefly. Ted shrugged and nodded. “Those dudes disappeared.”
“In truth, the low men don’t need any more Breakers,” Ted said. “They’ve got enough to finish the job right now.”
“How many?” Roland asked.
“About three hundred,” Dinky said.
“Three hundred and seven, to be exact,” Ted said. “We’re quartered in five dorms, although that word conjures the wrong image. We have our own suites, and as much—or as little— contact with our fellow Breakers as we wish.”
“And you know what you’re doing?” Susannah asked.
“Yes. Although most don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
“I don’t understand why they don’t mutiny.”
“What’s your when, ma’am?” Dinky asked her.
“My …?” Then she understood. “1964.”
He sighed and shook his head. “So you don’t know about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. It’s easier to explain if you know about that. Almost a thousand people committed suicide at this religious compound a Jesus-guy from San Francisco set up in Guyana. They drank poisoned Kool-Aid out of a tub while he watched them from the porch of his house and used a bullhorn to tell them stories about his mother.”
Susannah was staring at him with horrified disbelief, Ted with poorly disguised impatience. Yet he must have thought something about this was important, because he held silence.
“Almost a thousand,” Dinky reiterated. “Because they were confused and lonely and they thought Jim Jones was their friend. Because—dig it—they had nothing to go back to. And it’s like that here. If the Breakers united, they could make a mental hammer that’d knock Prentiss and The Weasel and the taheen and the can-toi all the way into the next galaxy. Instead there’s no one but me, Stanley, and everyone’s favorite super-breaker, the totally eventual Mr. Theodore Brautigan of Milford, Connecticut. Harvard Class of ‘20, Drama Society, Debate Club, editor of The Crimson, and—of course!—Phi Beta Crapper.”
“Can we trust you three?” Roland asked. The question sounded deceptively idle, little more than a time-passer.
“You have to,” Ted said. “You’ve no one else. Neither do we.”
“If we were on their side,” Dinky said, “don’t you think we’d have something better to wear on our feet than moccasins made out of rubber fuckin tires? In Blue Heaven you get everything except for a few basics. Stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily think of as indispensable, but stuff that … well, it’s harder to take a powder when you’ve got nothing to wear but your Algul Siento slippers, let’s put it that way.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Jake said. “All those people working to break the Beams, I mean. No offense, but—”
Dinky turned on him with his fists clenched and a tight, furious smile on his face. Oy immediately stepped in front of Jake, growling low and showing his teeth. Dinky either didn’t notice or paid no attention. “Yeah? Well guess what, kiddo? I take offense. I take offense like a motherfucker. What do you know about what it’s like to spend your whole life on the outside, to be the butt of the joke every time, to always be Carrie at the fuckin prom?”
“Who?” Eddie asked, confused, but Dinky was on a roll and paid no attention.
“There are guys down there who can’t walk or talk. One chick with no arms. Several with hydrocephalus, which means they have heads out to fuckin New Jersey.” He held his hands two feet beyond his head on either side, a gesture they all took for exaggeration. Later they would discover it was not. “Poor old Stanley here, he’s one of the ones who can’t talk.”
Roland glanced at Stanley, with his pallid, stubbly face and his masses of curly dark hair. And the gunslinger almost smiled. “I think he can talk,” he said, and then: “Do’ee bear your father’s name, Stanley? I believe thee does.”
Stanley lowered his head, and color mounted in his cheeks, yet he was smiling. At the same time he began to cry again. Just what in the hell’s going on here? Eddie wondered.
Ted clearly wondered, too. “Sai Deschain, I wonder if I could ask—”
“No, no, cry pardon,” Roland said. “Your time is short just now, so you said and we all feel it. Do the Breakers know how they’re being fed? What they’re being fed, to increase their powers?”
Ted abruptly sat on a rock and looked down at the shining steel cobweb of rails. “It has to do with the kiddies they bring through the Station, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“They don’t know and I don’t know,” Ted said in that same heavy voice. “Not really. We’re fed dozens of pills a day. They come morning, noon, and night. Some are vitamins. Some are no doubt intended to keep us docile. I’ve had some luck purging those from my system, and Dinky’s, and Stanley’s. Only … for such a purging to work, gunslinger, you must want it to work. Do you understand?”
Roland nodded.
“I’ve thought for a long time that they must also be giving us some kind of …I don’t know … brain-booster … but with so many pills, it’s impossible to tell which one it might be. Which one it is that makes us cannibals, or vampires, or both.” He paused, looking down at the improbable sunray. He extended his hands on both sides. Dinky took one, Stanley the other.
“Watch this,” Dinky said. “This is good.”
Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there was nothing to see but three men looking out over the dark desert toward the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam … and they were looking, Roland knew. Even with their eyes shut.
The sunbeam winked out. For a space of perhaps a dozen seconds the DevarToi was as dark as the desert, and Thunderclap Station, and the slopes of SteekTete. Then that absurd golden glow came back on. Dinky uttered a harsh (but not dissatisfied) sigh and stepped back, disengaging from Ted. A moment later, Ted let go of Stanley and turned to Roland.
“You did that?” the gunslinger asked.
“The three of us together,” Ted said. “Mostly it’s Stanley. He’s an extremely powerful sender. One of the few things that terrify Prentiss and the low men and the taheen is when they lose their artificial sunlight. It happens more and more often, you know, and not always because we’re meddling with the machinery. The machinery is just …” He shrugged. “It’s running down.”
“Everything is,” Eddie said.
Ted turned to him, unsmiling. “But not fast enough, Mr. Dean. This fiddling with the remaining two Beams must stop, and very soon, or it will make no difference. Dinky, Stanley, and I will help you if we can, even if it means killing the rest of them.”
“Sure,” Dinky said with a hollow smile. “If the Rev. Jim Jones could do it, why not us?”
Ted gave him a disapproving glance, then looked back at Roland’s ka-tet. “Perhaps it won’t come to that. But if it does …” He stood up suddenly and seized Roland’s arm. “Are we cannibals?” he asked in a harsh, almost strident voice. “Have we been eating the children the Gree
ncloaks bring from the Borderlands?”
Roland was silent.
Ted turned to Eddie. “I want to know.”
Eddie made no reply.
“Madam-sai?” Ted asked, looking at the woman who sat astride Eddie’s hip. “We’re prepared to help you. Will you not help me by telling me what I ask?”
“Would knowing change anything?” Susannah asked.
Ted looked at her for a moment longer, then turned to Jake. “You really could be my young friend’s twin,” he said. “Do you know that, son?”
“No, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Jake said. “It’s the way things work over here, somehow. Everything …um… fits.”
“Will you tell me what I want to know? Bobby would.”
So you can eat yourself alive? Jake thought. Eat yourself instead of them?
He shook his head. “I’m not Bobby,” he said. “No matter how much I might look like him.”
Ted sighed and nodded. “You stick together, and why would that surprise me? You’re ka-tet, after all.”
“We gotta go,” Dink told Ted. “We’ve already been here too long. It isn’t just a question of getting back for room-check; me n Stanley’ve got to trig their fucking telemetery so when Prentiss and The Wease check it they’ll say ‘Teddy B was there all the time. So was Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz, no problem with those boys.’”
“Yes,” Ted agreed. “I suppose you’re right. Five more minutes?”
Dinky nodded reluctantly. The sound of a siren, made faint by distance, came on the wind, and the young man’s teeth showed in a smile of genuine amusement. “They get so upset when the sun goes in,” he said. “When they have to face up to what’s really around them, which is some fucked-up version of nuclear winter.”
Ted put his hands in his pockets for a moment, looking down at his feet, then up at Roland. “It’s time that this … this grotesque comedy came to an end. We three will be back tomorrow, if all goes well. Meanwhile, there’s a bigger cave about forty yards down the slope, and on the side away from Thunderclap Station and Algul Siento. There’s food and sleeping bags and a stove that runs on propane gas. There’s a map, very crude, of the Algul. I’ve also left you a tape recorder and a number of tapes. They probably don’t explain everything you’d like to know, but they’ll fill in many of the blank spots. For now, just realize that Blue Heaven isn’t as nice as it looks. The ivy towers are watchtowers. There are three runs of fence around the whole place. If you’re trying to get out from the inside, the first run you strike gives you a sting—”
“Like barbwire,” Dink said.
“The second one packs enough of a wallop to knock you out,” Ted went on. “And the third—”
“I think we get the picture,” Susannah said.
“What about the Children of Roderick?” Roland asked. “They have something to do with the Devar, for we met one on our way here who said so.”
Susannah looked at Eddie with her eyebrows raised. Eddie gave her a tell-you-later look in return. It was a simple and perfect bit of wordless communication, the sort people who love each other take for granted.
“Those wanks,” Dinky said, but not without sympathy. “They’re … what do they call em in the old movies? Trusties, I guess. They’ve got a little village about two miles beyond the station in that direction.” He pointed. “They do groundskeeping work at the Algul, and there might be three or four skilled enough to do roofwork …replacing shingles and such. Whatever contaminants there are in the air here, those poor shmucks are especially vulnerable to em. Only on them it comes out looking like radiation sickness instead of just pimples and eczema.”
“Tell me about it,” Eddie said, remembering poor old Chevin of Chayven: his sore-eaten face and urine-soaked robe.
“They’re wandering folken,” Ted put in. “Bedouins. I think they follow the railroad tracks, for the most part. There are catacombs under the station and Algul Siento. The Rods know their way around them. There’s tons of food down there, and twice a week they’ll bring it into the Devar on sledges. Mostly now that’s what we eat. It’s still good, but …” He shrugged.
“Things are falling down fast,” Dinky said in a tone of uncharacteristic gloom. “But like the man said, the wine’s great.”
“If I asked you to bring one of the Children of Roderick with you tomorrow,” Roland said, “could you do that?”
Ted and Dinky exchanged a startled glance. Then both of them looked at Stanley. Stanley nodded, shrugged, and spread his hands before him, palms down: Why, gunslinger?
Roland stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he turned to Ted. “Bring one with half a brain left in his head,” Roland instructed. “Tell him ‘Dan sur, dan tur, dan Roland, dan Gilead.’ Tell it back.”
Without hesitation, Ted repeated it.
Roland nodded. “If he still hesitates, tell him Chevin of Chayven says he must come. They speak a little plain, do they not?”
“Sure,” Dinky said. “But mister … you couldn’t let a Rod come up here and see you and then turn him free again. Their mouths are hung in the middle and run on both ends.”
“Bring one,” Roland said, “and we’ll see what we see. I have what my ka-mai Eddie calls a hunch. Do you ken hunch-think?”
Ted and Dinky nodded.
“If it works out, fine. If not … be assured that the fellow you bring will never tell what he saw here.”
“You’d kill him if your hunch doesn’t pan out?” Ted asked. Roland nodded.
Ted gave a bitter laugh. “Of course you would. It reminds me of the part in Huckleberry Finn when Huck sees a steamboat blow up. He runs to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas with the news, and when one of them asks if anyone was killed, Huck says with perfect aplomb, ‘No, ma’am, only a nigger.’ In this case we can say ‘Only a Rod. Gunslinger-man had a hunch, but it didn’t pan out.’”
Roland gave him a cold smile, one that was unnaturally full of teeth. Eddie had seen it before and was glad it wasn’t aimed at him. He said, “I thought you knew what the stakes were, sai Ted. Did I misunderstand?”
Ted met his gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. His mouth was working.
During this, Dinky appeared to be engaged in silent palaver with Stanley. Now he said: “If you want a Rod, we’ll get you one. It’s not much of a problem. The problem may be getting here at all. If we don’t…”
Roland waited patiently for the young man to finish. When he didn’t, the gunslinger asked: “If you don’t, what would you have us do?”
Ted shrugged. The gesture was such a perfect imitation of Dinky’s that it was funny. “The best you can,” he said. “There are also weapons in the lower cave. A dozen of the electric fireballs they call sneetches. A number of machine-guns, what I’ve heard some of the low men call speed-shooters. They’re U.S. Army AR-15s. Other things we’re not sure of.”
“One of them’s some kind of sci-fi raygun like in a movie,” Dinky said. “I think it’s supposed to disintegrate things, but either I’m too dumb to turn it on or the battery’s dead.” He turned anxiously to the white-haired man. “Five minutes are up, and more. We have to put an egg in our shoe and beat it, Tedster. Let’s chug.”
“Yes. Well, we’ll be back tomorrow. Perhaps by then you’ll have a plan.”
“You don’t?” Eddie asked, surprised.
“My plan was to run, young man. It seemed like a terribly bright idea at the time. I ran all the way to the spring of 1960. They caught me and brought me back, with a little help from my young friend Bobby’s mother. And now, we really must—”
“One more minute, do it please ya,” Roland said, and stepped toward Stanley. Stanley looked down at his feet, but his beard-scruffy cheeks once more flooded with color. And—
He’s shivering, Susannah thought. Like an animal in the woods, faced with its first human being.
Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah associated with ce
rtain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow’s forearms and looked earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger’s eyes met nothing but the masses of dark, curly hair on Stanley’s bowed head.
Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced him with a gesture.
“Will’ee not look me in the face?” Roland asked. He spoke with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice. “Will’ee not, before you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?”
Susannah felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Eddie grunted like a man who has been punched. She thought, But Roland’s old …so old! Which means that if this is the tavern-boy he knew in Mejis … the one with the donkey and the pink sombrera hat … then he must also be …
The man raised his face slowly. Tears were streaming from his eyes.
“Good old Will Dearborn,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will do when it has lain long unused. “I’m so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun and shoot me, I’d understand. So I would.”
“Why do’ee say so, Sheemie?” Roland asked in that same gentle voice.
Stanley’s tears flowed faster. “You saved my life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mostly you, good old Will Dearborn who was really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved! And I loved her, too!”
The man’s face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from Roland. Yet Roland held him.
“None of that was your fault, Sheemie.”
“I should have died for her!” he cried. “I should have died in her place! I’m stupid! Foolish as they said!” He slapped himself across the face, first one way and then the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized the hand and forced it down to his side again.
“’Twas Rhea did the harm,” Roland said.
Stanley—who had been Sheemie an eon ago—looked into Roland’s face, searching his eyes.
“Aye,” Roland said, nodding. “’Twas the Cöos … and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless in the business, Sheemie—Stanley—it was you.”