by Stephen King
“Absa-fackin-lutely no teleports,” was what Finli said now, and led Prentiss to an instrument console that looked eerily like Susannah Dean’s visualization of her Dogan. He pointed at two dials marked in the henscratch of the old people (marks similar to those on the Unfound Door). The needle of each dial lay flat against the O mark on the left. When Finli tapped them with his furry thumbs, they jumped a little and then fell back.
“We don’t know exactly what these dials were actually meant to measure,” he said, “but one thing they do measure is teleportation potential. We’ve had Breakers who’ve tried to shield the talent and it doesn’t work. If there was a teleport in the woodpile, Pimli o’ New Jersey, these needles would be jittering all the way up to fifty or even eighty.”
“So.” Half-smiling, half-serious, Pimli began to count off on his fingers. “No teleports, no Bleeding Lion stalking from the north, no gunslinger-man. Oh, and the Greencloaks succumbed to a computer virus. If all that’s the case, what’s gotten under your skin? What feels hinky-di-di to ya?”
“The approaching end, I suppose.” Finli sighed heavily. “I’m going to double the guard in the watchtowers tonight, any ro’, and humes along the fence, as well.”
“Because it feels hinky-di-di.” Pimli, smiling a little.
“Hinky-di-di, yar.” Finli did not smile; his cunning little teeth remained hidden inside his shiny brown muzzle.
Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go up to The Study. Perhaps seeing all those Breakers at work will soothe you.”
“P’rhaps it will,” Finli said, but he still didn’t smile.
Pimli said gently, “It’s all right, Fin.”
“I suppose,” said the taheen, looking doubtfully around at the equipment, and then at Beeman and Trelawney, the two low men, who were respectfully waiting at the door for the two big bugs to finish their palaver. “I suppose ‘tis.” Only his heart didn’t believe it. The only thing he was sure his heart believed was that there were no teleports left in Algul Siento.
Telemetry didn’t lie.
SEVEN
Beeman and Trelawney saw them all the way down the oak-paneled basement corridor to the staff elevator, which was also oak-paneled. There was a fire-extinguisher on the wall of the car and another sign reminding Devar-folken that they had to work together to create a fire-free environment.
This too had been turned upside down.
Pimli’s eyes met Finli’s. The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chief’s look, but of course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor, reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered in the shaft. If it froze, escape through the upper hatch would be no problem, not even for a slightly overweight (well … quite overweight) fellow like Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and there was plenty of help near at hand.
They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed elevator door was rightside up. It said STAFF ONLY and PLEASE USE KEY and GO DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY.
As Finli produced his key-card, he said with a casualness that might have been feigned (God damn his unreadable black eyes): “Have you heard from sai Sayre?”
“No,” Pimli said (rather crossly), “nor do I really expect to. We’re isolated here for a reason, deliberately forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be … well, the last time I saw him.”
“Relax,” Finli said. “I was just asking.” He swiped the key-card down its slot and the elevator door slid open with a rather hellish screee sound.
EIGHT
The Study was a long, high room in the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass roof that allowed the Algul’s hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the balcony opposite the door through which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall. Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of careful—and sometimes brittle—courtesy, but one did not expect to see them socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it came to “socializing.” The Breakers below were neither animals in a zoo nor exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli o’ Tego, as well) had made this point to the staff over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named David Burke, who had actually been throwing something—had it been peanut-shells?—down on the Breakers below. When Burke had realized the Master was serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he’d never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear. He’d seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years, perhaps for decades, and had taken it. You could see the now truly idiotic Mr. Burke around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left’rds Bound’ry, mouth slack and eyes vaguely puzzled— I almost know who I am, I almost remember what I did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn’t done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.
Because it was refreshing.
For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called “good mind” kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one’s heels leaving the floor in a kind of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you’d forgotten something, your five o’clock appointment or your brother-in-law’s middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you’d forgotten was important, you were never distressed. Folken left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they’d come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.
The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached the wide fumed-oak railing and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious library of some richly endowed gentlemen’s club in London. Softly glowing lamps, many with genuine Tiffany shades, stood on little tables or shone on the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were the most exquisite Turkish. There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another … and on a third was the Mona Lisa. The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in the Louvre on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him. From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting—trying to decipher the famously enigmatic smile, maybe—but Pimli knew better. The men and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if you were right down there you’d see that they were gazing blankly over the tops of their McCall’s and their Harper’s or a little off to one side. An eleven-or twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer dress that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she wasn’t paying any attention to the exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.
Thirty-three of them down there. Thirty-three in all. At eight o’clock, an hour after the artificial sun snapped off, thirty-three fresh Break
ers would troop in. And there was one fellow—one and one only—who came and went just as he pleased. A fellow who’d gone under the wire and paid no penalty for it at all … except for being brought back, that was, and for this man, that was penalty enough.
As if the thought had summoned him, the door at the end of the room opened, and Ted Brautigan slipped quietly in. He was still wearing his tweed riding cap. Daneeka Rostov looked up from the dollhouse and gave him a smile. Brautigan dropped her a wink in return. Pimli gave Finli a little nudge.
Finli: (I see him )
But it was more than seeing. They felt him. The moment Brautigan came into the room, those on the balcony—and, much more important, those on the floor—felt the power-level rise. They still weren’t completely sure what they’d gotten in Brautigan, and the testing equipment didn’t help in that regard (the old dog had blown out several pieces of it himself, and on purpose, the Master was quite sure). If there were others like him, the low men had found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had all the talent they needed to finish the job). One thing that did seem clear was Brautigan’s talent as a facilitator, a psychic who was not just powerful by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just by being near them. Finli’s thoughts, ordinarily unreadable even to Breakers, now burned in Pimli’s mind like neon.
Finli: (He is extraordinary )
Pimli: (And, so far as we know, unique Have you seen the thing )
Image: Eyes growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.
Finli: (Yes Do you know what causes it )
Pimli: (Not at all Nor care dear Finli nor care That old )
Image: An elderly mongrel with burdocks in his matted fur, limping along on three legs.
(has almost finished his work almost time to )
Image: A gun, one of the hume guards’ Berettas, against the side of the old mongrel’s head.
Three stories below them, the subject of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a leather-upholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to swallow him, and appeared to read.
Pimli felt the psychic force rising past them and through them, to the skylight and through that, too, rising to the Beam that ran directly above Algul, working against it, chipping and eroding and rubbing relentlessly against the grain. Eating holes in the magic. Working patiently to put out the eyes of the Bear. To crack the shell of the Turtle. To break the Beam which ran from Shardik to Maturin. To topple the Dark Tower which stood between.
Pimli turned to his companion and wasn’t surprised to realize he could now see the cunning little teeth in the Tego’s weasel head. Smiling at last! Nor was he surprised to realize he could read the black eyes. Taheen, under ordinary circumstances, could send and receive some very simple mental communications, but not be progged. Here, though, all that changed. Here—
—Here Finli o’ Tego was at peace. His concerns
(hinky-di-di )
were gone. At least for the time being.
Pimli sent Finli a series of bright images: a champagne bottle breaking over the stern of a boat; hundreds of flat black graduation caps rising in the air; a flag being planted on Mount Everest; a laughing couple escaping a church with their heads bent against a pelting storm of rice; a planet — Earth — suddenly glowing with fierce brilliance.
Images that all said the same thing.
“Yes,” Finli said, and Pimli wondered how he could ever have thought those eyes hard to read. “Yes, indeed. Success at the end of the day.”
Neither of them looked down at that moment. Had they done, they would have seen Ted Brautigan—an old dog, yes, and tired, but perhaps not quite as tired as some thought— looking up at them.
With a ghost of his own smile.
NINE
There was never rain out here, at least not during Pimli’s years, but sometimes, in the Stygian blackness of its nights, there were great volleys of dry thunder. Most of the DevarToi’s staff had trained themselves to sleep through these fusillades, but Pimli often woke up, heart hammering in his throat, the Our Father running through his mostly unconscious mind like a circle of spinning red ribbon.
Earlier that day, talking to Finli, the Master of Algul Siento had used the phrase hinky-di-di with a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child’s phrase, almost, like allee-allee-in-free or eenie-meenie-minie-moe.
Now, lying in his bed at Shapleigh House (known as Shit House to the Breakers), a full Mall’s length away from Damli House, Pimli remembered the feeling—the flat-out certainty— that everything was going to be okay; success assured, only a matter of time. On the balcony Finli had shared it, but Pimli wondered if his Security Chief was now lying awake as Pimli himself was, and thinking how easy it was to be misled when you were around working Breakers. Because, do ya, they sent up that happy-gas. That good-mind vibe.
And suppose … just suppose, now … someone was actually channeling that feeling? Sending it up to them like a lullabye? Go to sleep, Pimli, go to sleep, Finli, go to sleep all of you good children …
Ridiculous idea, totally paranoid. Still, when another double-boom of thunder rolled out of what might still be the southeast—from the direction of Fedic and the Discordia, anyway— Pimli Prentiss sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.
Finli had spoken of doubling the guard tonight, both in the watchtowers and along the fences. Perhaps tomorrow they might triple it. Just to be on the safe side. And because complacency this close to the end would be a very bad thing, indeed.
Pimli got out of bed, a tall man with a hairy slab of gut, now wearing blue pajama pants and nothing else. He pissed, then knelt in front of the toilet’s lowered lid, folded his hands, and prayed until he felt sleepy. He prayed to do his duty. He prayed to see trouble before trouble saw him. He prayed for his Ma, just as Jim Jones had prayed for his as he watched the line move toward the tub of poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to little more than a senile mutter, then went back to bed, calm again. His last thought before drifting off was about tripling the guard first thing in the morning, and that was the first thing he thought of when he woke to a room awash in artificial sunlight. Because you had to take care of the eggs when you were almost home.
CHAPTER VII:
KASHUME
ONE
A feeling both blue and strange crept among the gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged to him or her alone. Roland, who might have been expected to know the feeling for what it was (kashume, Cort would have called it), ascribed it instead to worries about the following day and even more to the debilitating atmosphere of Thunderclap, where day was dim and night was as dark as blindness.
Certainly there was enough to keep them busy after the departure of Brautigan, Earnshaw, and Sheemie Ruiz, that friend of Roland’s childhood. (Both Susannah and Eddie had attempted to talk to the gunslinger about Sheemie, and Roland had shaken them off. Jake, strong in the touch, hadn’t even tried. Roland wasn’t ready to talk about those old days again, at least not yet.) There was a path leading down and around the flank of SteekTete, and they found the cave of which the old man had told them behind a cunning camouflage of rocks and desert-dusty bushes. This cave was much bigger than the one above, with gas lanterns hung from spikes that had been driven into the rock walls. Jake and Eddie lit two of these on each side, and the four of them examined the cave’s contents in silence.
The first thing Roland noticed was the sleeping-bags: a quartet lined up against the lefthand wall, each considerately placed on an inflated air mattress. The tags on the bags read PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. Beside the last of these, a fifth air mattress had been covered with a layer of bath towels. They were expecting four people and one animal, the gunslinger thought. Precognition, or have they been watching us somehow? And does it matter?
There was a plastic-swaddled object sitt
ing on a barrel marked DANGER! MUNITIONS! Eddie removed the protective plastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of the reels was loaded. Roland could make nothing of the single word on the front of the speaking machine and asked Susannah what it was.
“Wollensak,” she said. “A German company. When it comes to these things, they make the best.”
“Not no mo’, sugarbee,” Eddie said. “In my when we like to say ‘Sony! No baloney!’ They make a tape-player you can clip right to your belt. It’s called a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighs twenty pounds. More, with the batteries.”
Susannah was examining the unmarked tape boxes that had been stacked beside the Wollensak. There were three of them. “I can’t wait to hear what’s on these,” she said.
“After the daylight goes, maybe,” Roland said. “For now, let’s see what else we’ve got here.”
“Roland?” Jake asked.
The gunslinger turned toward him. There was something about the boy’s face that almost always softened Roland’s own. Looking at Jake did not make the gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give his features a quality they didn’t ordinarily have. Susannah thought it was the look of love. And, perhaps, some thin hope for the future.
“What is it, Jake?”
“I know we’re going to fight—”
“‘Join us next week for Return to the O.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee Van Cleef,’” Eddie murmured, walking toward the back of the cave. There a much larger object had been covered with what looked like a quilted mover’s pad.