by Stephen King
“—but when?” Jake continued. “Will it be tomorrow?”
“Perhaps,” Roland replied. “I think the day after’s more likely.”
“I have a terrible feeling,” Jake said. “It’s not being afraid, exactly—”
“Do you think they’re going to beat us, hon?” Susannah asked. She put a hand on Jake’s neck and looked into his face. She had come to respect his feelings. She sometimes wondered how much of what he was now had to do with the creature he’d faced to get here: the thing in the house on Dutch Hill. No robot there, no rusty old clockwork toy. The doorkeeper had been a genuine leftover of the Prim. “You smell a whuppin in the wind? That it?”
“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve only felt something like it once, and that was just before …”
“Just before what?” Susannah asked, but before Jake had a chance to reply, Eddie broke in. Roland was glad. Just before I fell. That was how Jake had meant to finish. Just before Roland let me fall.
“Holy shit! Come here, you guys! You gotta see this!”
Eddie had pulled away the mover’s pad and revealed a motorized vehicle that looked like a cross between an ATV and a gigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep zigzag treads. The controls were all on the handlebars. And there was a playing card propped on the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie plucked it up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman with a shawl over her head at a spinning wheel. It was the Lady of Shadows.
“Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride, sugarbee,” Eddie said.
Susannah had hurried over at her rapid crawl. Now she lifted her arms. “Boost me up! Boost me, Eddie!”
He did, and when she was in the saddle, holding handlebars instead of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susannah thumbed a red button and the engine thrummed to life, so low you could barely hear it. Electricity, not gasoline, Eddie was quite sure. Like a golf-cart, but probably a lot faster.
Susannah turned toward them, smiling radiantly. She patted the three-wheeler’s dark brown nacelle. “Call me Missus Centaur! I been lookin for this my whole life and never even knew.”
None of them noticed the stricken expression on Roland’s face. He bent over to pick up the card Eddie had dropped so no one would.
Yes, it was her, all right—the Lady of the Shadows. Under her shawl she seemed to be smiling craftily and sobbing, both at the same time. On the last occasion he’d seen that card, it had been in the hand of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes that of Flagg.
You have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, he had said. Worlds turn about your head.
And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among them for what it almost certainly was: not worry or weariness but kashume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meant to sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.
Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows. Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming battle to break the power of the DevarToi. And once again the scales which had temporarily tilted in their favor would balance.
It never once crossed Roland’s mind that the one to die might be him.
TWO
There were three brand names on what Eddie immediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (as in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the Takuro Spirit); the third was North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well: U.S. ARMY, as in PROPERTY OF.
Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did. God knew there was plenty more to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat was filled with food supplies (mostly freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn’t taste as good as Nigel’s chow but would at least nourish them), bottled water, canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but nothing alcoholic), and the promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry. Some of the crates were marked U.S. ARMY, but by no means all.
Now their most basic abilities came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those talents and intuitions that could have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakened them … cosseted them …and then filed their teeth to deadly points.
Hardly a word was spoken among them as Roland produced a wide prying tool from his purse and levered away the tops of the crates. Susannah had forgotten about the Cruisin Trike she had been waiting for all her life; Eddie forgot to make jokes; Roland forgot about his sense of foreboding. They became absorbed in the weaponry that had been left for them, and there was no piece of it they did not understand either at once or after a bit of study.
There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15’s. Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums. They looked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics like White Heat, only these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over, and found exactly what he expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a whole company of men, that was sure.
There was a box of what looked like rocket shells with the letters STS stenciled on each. In a rack beside them, propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took to stop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.
Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome, like the severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols with the word COYOTE embossed on the butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to both weapons (in truth his heart was attracted to all the weapons), but he took one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but only of looking and knowing.
“Hey,” Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. “Come look at this. Sneetches.”
“Check out the crate-lid,” Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside; Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the drawing read:
PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON
24 “SNEETCHES”
HARRY POTTER MODEL
SERIAL #465-17-CC NDJKR
“Don’t Mess with the 449!”
We’ll Kick the “Slytherin” Out of You!
There were two dozen sneetches in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic excelsior. None of Roland’s band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during their battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which they could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up a sneetch. They were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier. Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines of latitude and longitude. Although they looked like steel, the surfaces had a faint giving quality, like very hard rubber.
There was an ID-plate on each sneetch and a button beside it. “That wakes it up,” Eddie murmured, and Jake nodded. There was also a small depressed area in the curved surface, just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the slightest worry that the thing would explode, or maybe extrude a minibu
zzsaw that would cut off his fingers. You used the button at the bottom of the depression to access the programming. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he most certainly did.
A curved section of the sneetch’s surface slid away with a faint Auowwm! sound. Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and one flashing slow amber pulses. There were seven windows, now showing 0 00 00 00. Beneath each was a button so small that you’d need something like the end of a straightened paperclip to push it. “The size of a bug’s asshole,” as Eddie grumbled later on, while trying to program one. To the right of the windows were another two buttons, these marked S and W.
Jake showed it to Roland. “This one’s SET and the other one’s WAIT. Do you think so? I think so.”
Roland nodded. He’d never seen such a weapon before— not close up, at any rate—but, coupled with the windows, he thought the use of the buttons was obvious. And he thought the sneetches might be useful in a way the long-shooters with their atom-shells would not be. SET and WAIT.
SET … and WAIT.
“Did Ted and his two pals leave all this stuff for us here?” Susannah asked.
Roland hardly thought it mattered who’d left it—it was here and that was enough—but he nodded.
“How? And where’d they get it?”
Roland didn’t know. What he did know was that the cave was a ma’sun—a war-chest. Below them, men were making war on the Tower which the line of Eld was sworn to protect. He and his tet would fall upon them by surprise, and with these tools they would smite and smite until their enemies lay with their boots pointed to the sky.
Or until theirs did.
“Maybe he explains on one of the tapes he left us,” Jake said.
He had engaged the safety of his new Cobra automatic and tucked it away in the shoulder-bag with the remaining Orizas. Susannah had also helped herself to one of the Cobras, after twirling it around her finger a time or two, like Annie Oakley.
“Maybe he does,” she said, and gave Jake a smile. It had been a long time since Susannah had felt so physically well. So notpreg. Yet her mind was troubled. Or perhaps it was her spirit.
Eddie was holding up a piece of cloth that had been rolled into a tube and tied with three hanks of string. “That guy Ted said he was leaving us a map of the prison-camp. Bet this is it. Anyone ‘sides me want a look?”
They all did. Jake helped Eddie to unroll the map. Brautigan had warned them it was rough, and it surely was: really no more than a series of circles and squares. Susannah saw the name of the little town—Pleasantville—and thought again of Ray Bradbury. Jake was tickled by the crude compass, where the map-maker had added a question mark beside the letter N.
While they were studying this hastily rendered example of cartography, a long and wavering cry rose in the murk outside. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around nervously. Oy raised his head from his paws, gave a low, brief growl, then put his head back down again and appeared to go to sleep: Hell wit’choo, bad boy, I’m wit’ my homies and I ain’t ascairt.
“What is it?” Eddie asked. “A coyote? A jackal?”
“Some kind of desert dog,” Roland agreed absently. He was squatted on his hunkers (which suggested his hip was better, at least temporarily) with his arms wrapped around his shins. He never took his eyes from the crude circles and squares drawn on the cloth. “Can-toi-tete.”
“Is that like Dan -Tete?” Jake asked.
Roland ignored him. He scooped up the map and left the cave with it, not looking back. The others shared a glance and then followed him, once more wrapping their blankets about them like shawls.
THREE
Roland returned to where Sheemie (with a little help from his friends) had brought them through. This time the gunslinger used the binoculars, looking down at Blue Heaven long and long. Somewhere behind them, the desert dog howled again, a lonely sound in the gloom.
And, Jake thought, the gloom was gloomier now. Your eyes adjusted as the day dialed itself down, but that brilliant spotlight of sun seemed brighter than ever by contrast. He was pretty sure the deal with the sun-machine was that you got your full-on, your full-off, and nothing in between. Maybe they even let it shine all night, but Jake doubted it. People’s nervous systems were set up for an orderly progression of dark and day, he’d learned that in science class. You could make do with long periods of low light—people did it every year in the Arctic countries—but it could really mess with your head. Jake didn’t think the guys in charge down there would want to goof up their Breakers if they could help it. Also, they’d want to save their “sun” for as long as they could; everything here was old and prone to breakdowns.
At last Roland gave the binoculars to Susannah. “Do look ya especially at the buildings on either end of the grassy rectangle.” He unrolled the map like a character about to read a scroll in a stage-play, glanced at it briefly, and then said, “They’re numbered 2 and 3 on the map.”
Susannah studied them carefully. The one marked 2, the Warden’s House, was a small Cape Cod painted electric blue with white trim. It was what her mother might have called a fairytale house, because of the bright colors and the gingerbread scalloping around the eaves.
Damli House was much bigger, and as she looked, she saw several people going in and out. Some had the carefree look of civilians. Others seemed much more—oh, call it watchful. And she saw two or three slumping along under loads of stuff. She handed the glasses to Eddie and asked him if those were Children of Roderick.
“I think so,” he said, “but I can’t be completely—”
“Never mind the Rods,” Roland said, “not now. What do you think of those two buildings, Susannah?”
“Well,” she said, proceeding carefully (she did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what it was he wanted from her), “they’re both beautifully maintained, especially compared to some of the falling-down wrecks we’ve seen on our travels. The one they call Damli House is especially handsome. It’s a style we call Queen Anne, and—”
“Are they of wood, do you think, or just made to look that way? I’m particularly interested in the one called Damli.”
Susannah redirected the binoculars there, then handed them to Eddie. He looked, then handed them to Jake. While Jake was looking, there was an audible CLICK! sound that rolled to them across the miles … and the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam which had been shining down on the DevarToi like a spotlight went out, leaving them in a thick purple dusk which would soon be complete and utter dark.
In it, the desert-dog began to howl again, raising the skin on Jake’s arms into gooseflesh. The sound rose … rose …and suddenly cut off with one final choked syllable. It sounded like some final cry of surprise, and Jake had no doubt that the desert-dog was dead. Something had crept up behind it, and when the big overhead light went out—
There were still lights on down there, he saw: a double white row that might have been streetlights in “Pleasantville,” yellow circles that were probably arc-sodiums along the various paths of what Susannah was calling Breaker U … and spotlights running random patterns across the dark.
No, Jake thought, not spotlights. Searchlights. Like in a prison movie. “Let’s go back,” he said. “There’s nothing to see anymore, and I don’t like it out here in the dark.”
Roland agreed. They followed him in single file, with Eddie carrying Susannah and Jake walking behind them with Oy at his heel. He kept expecting a second desert-dog to take up the cry of the first, but none did.
FOUR
“They were wood,” Jake said. He was sitting cross-legged beneath one of the gas lanterns, letting its welcome white glow shine down on his face.
“Wood,” Eddie agreed.
Susannah hesitated a moment, sensing it was a question of real importance and reviewing what she had seen. Then she also nodded. “Wood, I’m almost positive. Especially the one they call Damli House. A Queen Anne built out of stone or brick and camouflaged to look like wood? It makes no sense.”
; “If it fools wandering folk who’d burn it down,” Roland said, “it does. It does make sense.”
Susannah thought about it. He was right, of course, but—
“I still say wood.”
Roland nodded. “So do I.” He had found a large green bottle marked PERRIER. Now he opened it and ascertained that Perrier was water. He took five cups and poured a measure into each. He set them down in front of Jake, Susannah, Eddie, Oy, and himself.
“Do you call me dinh?” he asked Eddie.
“Yes, Roland, you know I do.”
“Will you share khef with me, and drink this water?”
“Yes, if you like.” Eddie had been smiling, but now he wasn’t. The feeling was back, and it was strong. Kashume, a rueful word he did not yet know.
“Drink, bondsman.”
Eddie didn’t exactly like being called bondsman, but he drank his water. Roland knelt before him and put a brief, dry kiss on Eddie’s lips. “I love you, Eddie,” he said, and outside in the ruin that was Thunderclap, a desert wind arose, carrying gritty poisoned dust.
“Why…I love you, too,” Eddie said. It was surprised out of him. “What’s wrong? And don’t tell me nothing is, because I feel it.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Roland said, smiling, but Jake had never heard the gunslinger sound so sad. It terrified him. “It’s only kashume, and it comes to every ka-tet that ever was … but now, while we are whole, we share our water. We share our khef. ‘Tis a jolly thing to do.”
He looked at Susannah.
“Do you call me dinh?”
“Yes, Roland, I call you dinh.” She looked very pale, but perhaps it was only the white light from the gas lanterns.
“Will you share khef with me, and drink this water?”
“With pleasure,” said she, and took up the plastic cup.
“Drink, bondswoman.”
She drank, her grave dark eyes never leaving his. She thought of the voices she’d heard in her dream of the Oxford jail-cell: this one dead, that one dead, t’other one dead; O Discordia, and the shadows grow deeper.
Roland kissed her mouth. “I love you, Susannah.”