by Stephen King
“He says it doesn’t hurt,” Dinky said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
Inside the cave the others laughed at something, Sheemie back to consciousness and taking nourishment, everyone the best of friends.
“It’s not,” Eddie said. “What does Ted think is happening to Sheemie when he teleports?”
“That he’s having brain hemorrhages,” Dinky said promptly.
“Little tiny strokes on the surface of his brain.” He tapped a finger at different points on his own skull in demonstration. “Boink, boink, boink.”
“Is it getting worse? It is, isn’t it?”
“Look, if you think him jaunting us around is my idea, you better think again.”
Eddie raised one hand like a traffic cop. “No, no. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.” And what our chances are.
“I hate using him that way!” Dinky burst out. He kept his voice pitched low, so those in the cave wouldn’t hear, but Eddie never for a moment considered that he was exaggerating. Dinky was badly upset. “He doesn’t mind—he wants to do it— and that makes it worse, not better. The way he looks at Ted…” He shrugged. “It’s the way a dog’d look at the best master in the universe. He looks at your dinh the same way, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“He’s doing it for my dinh,” Eddie said, “and that makes it okay. You may not believe that, Dink, but—”
“But you do.”
“Totally. Now here’s the really important question: does Ted have any idea how long Sheemie can last? Keeping in mind that now he’s got a little more help at this end?”
Who you tryin to cheer up, bro? Henry spoke up suddenly inside his head. Cynical as always. Him or yourself?
Dinky was looking at Eddie as if he were crazy, or soft in the head, at least. “Ted was an accountant. Sometimes a tutor. A daylaborer when he couldn’t get anything better. He’s no doctor.”
But Eddie kept pushing. “What does he think?”
Dinky paused. The wind blew. The music wafted. Farther away, thunder mumbled out of the murk. At last he said: “Three or four times, maybe … but the effects are getting worse. Maybe only twice. But there are no guarantees, okay? He could drop dead of a massive stroke the next time he bears down to make that hole we go through.”
Eddie tried to think of another question and couldn’t. That last answer pretty well covered the waterfront, and when Susannah called them back inside, he was more than glad to go.
FOUR
Sheemie Ruiz had rediscovered his appetite, which all of them took as a good sign, and was tucking in happily. The bloodspots in his eyes had faded somewhat, but were still clearly visible. Eddie wondered what the guards back in Blue Heaven would make of those if they noticed them, and also wondered if Sheemie could wear a pair of sunglasses without exciting comment.
Roland had gotten the Rod to his feet and was now conferring with him at the back of the cave. Well … sort of. The gunslinger was talking and the Rod was listening, occasionally sneaking tiny awed peeks at Roland’s face. It was gibberish to Eddie, but he was able to pick out two words: Chevin and Chayven. Roland was asking this one about the one they’d met staggering along the road in Lovell.
“Does he have a name?” Eddie asked Dink and Ted, taking a second plate of food.
“I call him Chucky,” Dinky said. “Because he looks a little bit like the doll in this horror movie I saw once.”
Eddie grinned. “Child’s Play, yeah. I saw that one. After your when, Jake. And way after yours, Suziella.” The Rod’s hair wasn’t right, but the chubby, freckled cheeks and the blue eyes were. “Do you think he can keep a secret?”
“If no one asks him, he can,” Ted said. Which was not, in Eddie’s view, a very satisfactory answer.
After five minutes or so of chat, Roland seemed satisfied and rejoined the others. He hunkered—no problem doing that now that his joints had limbered up—and looked at Ted. “This fellow’s name is Haylis of Chayven. Will anyone miss him?”
“Unlikely,” Ted said. “The Rods show up at the gate beyond the dorms in little groups, looking for work. Fetching and carrying, mostly. They’re given a meal or something to drink as pay. If they don’t show up, no one misses them.”
“Good. Now—how long are the days here? Is it twenty-four hours from now until tomorrow morning at this time?”
Ted seemed interested in the question and considered it for several moments before replying. “Call it twenty-five,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. Because time is slowing down, at least here. As the Beams weaken, there seems to be a growing disparity in the time-flow between the worlds. It’s probably one of the major stress points.”
Roland nodded. Susannah offered him food and he shook his head with a word of thanks. Behind them, the Rod was sitting on a crate, looking down at his bare and sore-covered feet. Eddie was surprised to see Oy approach the fellow, and more surprised still when the bumbler allowed Chucky (or Haylis) to stroke his head with one misshapen claw of a hand.
“And is there a time of morning when things down there might be a little less …I don’t know …”
“A little disorganized?” Ted suggested.
Roland nodded.
“Did you hear a horn a little while ago?” Ted asked. “Just before we showed up?”
They all shook their heads.
Ted didn’t seem surprised. “But you heard the music start, correct?”
“Yes,” Susannah said, and offered Ted a fresh can of Nozz-ALa. He took it and drank with gusto. Eddie tried not to shudder.
“Thank you, ma’am. In any case, the horn signals the change of shifts. The music starts then.”
“I hate that music,” Dinky said moodily. “If there’s any time when control wavers,” Ted went on, “that would be it.”
“And what o’clock is that?” Roland asked.
Ted and Dinky exchanged a doubtful glance. Dinky showed eight fingers, his eyebrows raised questioningly. He looked relieved when Ted nodded at once.
“Yes, eight o’clock,” Ted said, then laughed and gave his head a cynical little shake. “What would be eight, anyway, in a world where yon prison might always lie firmly east and not east by southeast on some days and dead east on others.”
But Roland had been living with the dissolving world long before Ted Brautigan had even dreamed of such a place as Algul Siento, and he wasn’t particularly upset by the way formerly hard-and-fast facts of life had begun to bend. “About twenty-five hours from right now,” Roland said. “Or a little less.”
Dinky nodded. “But if you’re counting on raging confusion, forget it. They know their places and go to them. They’re old hands.”
“Still,” Roland said, “it’s the best we’re apt to do.” Now he looked at his old acquaintance from Mejis. And beckoned to him.
FIVE
Sheemie set his plate down at once, came to Roland, and made a fist. “Hile, Roland, Will Dearborn that was.”
Roland returned this greeting, then turned to Jake. The boy gave him an uncertain look. Roland nodded at him, and Jake came. Now Jake and Sheemie stood facing each other with Roland hunkered between them, seeming to look at neither now that they were brought together.
Jake raised a hand to his forehead.
Sheemie returned the gesture.
Jake looked down at Roland and said, “What do you want?”
Roland didn’t answer, only continued to look serenely toward the mouth of the cave, as if there were something in the apparently endless murk out there which interested him. And Jake knew what was wanted, as surely as if he had used the touch on Roland’s mind to find out (which he most certainly had not). They had come to a fork in the road. It had been Jake who’d suggested Sheemie should be the one to tell them which branch to take. At the time it had seemed like a weirdly good idea— who knew why. Now, looking into that earnest, not-very-bright face and those bloodshot eyes, Jake wondered two things: what had ever possessed him to suggest such a
course of action, and why someone—probably Eddie, who retained a relatively hard head in spite of all they’d been through—hadn’t told him, kindly but firmly, that putting their future in Sheemie Ruiz’s hands was a dumb idea. Totally noodgy, as his old schoolmates back at Piper might have said. Now Roland, who believed that even in the shadow of death there were still lessons to be learned, wanted Jake to ask the question Jake himself had proposed, and the answer would no doubt expose him as the superstitious scatterbrain he had become. Yet still, why not ask? Even if it were the equivalent of flipping a coin, why not? Jake had come, possibly at the end of a short but undeniably interesting life, to a place where there were magic doors, mechanical butlers, telepathy (of which he was capable, at least to some small degree, himself), vampires, and were-spiders. So why not let Sheemie choose? They had to go one way or the other, after all, and he’d been through too goddam much to worry about such a paltry thing as looking like an idiot in front of his companions. Besides, he thought, if I’m not among friends here, I never will be.
“Sheemie,” he said. Looking into those bloody eyes was sort of horrible, but he made himself do it. “We’re on a quest. That means we have a job to do. We—”
“You have to save the Tower,” said Sheemie. “And my old friend is to go in, and mount to the top, and see what’s to see. There may be renewal, there may be death, or there may be both. He was Will Dearborn once, aye, so he was. Will Dearborn to me.”
Jake glanced at Roland, who was still hunkered down, looking out of the cave. But Jake thought his face had gone pale and strange.
One of Roland’s fingers made his twirling go-ahead gesture.
“Yes, we’re supposed to save the Dark Tower,” Jake agreed. And thought he understood some of Roland’s lust to see it and enter it, even if it killed him. What lay at the center of the universe? What man (or boy) could but wonder, once the question was thought of, and want to see?
Even if looking drove him mad?
“But in order to do that, we have to do two jobs. One involves going back to our world and saving a man. A writer who’s telling our story. The other job is the one we’ve been talking about. Freeing the Breakers.” Honesty made him add: “Or stopping them, at least. Do you understand?”
But this time Sheemie didn’t reply. He was looking where Roland was looking, out into the murk. His face was that of someone who’s been hypnotized. Looking at it made Jake uneasy, but he pushed on. He had come to his question, after all, and where else was there to go but on?
“The question is, which job do we do first? It’d seem that saving the writer might be easier because there’s no opposition … that we know of, anyway … but there’s a chance that … well …” Jake didn’t want to say But there’s a chance that teleporting us might kill you, and so came to a lame and unsatisfying halt.
For a moment he didn’t think Sheemie would make any reply, leaving him with the job of deciding whether or not to try again, but then the former tavern-boy spoke. He looked at none of them as he did so, but only out of the cave and into the dim of Thunderclap.
“I had a dream last night, so I did,” said Sheemie of Mejis, whose life had once been saved by three young gunslingers from Gilead. “I dreamed I was back at the Travellers’ Rest, only Coral wasn’t there, nor Stanley, nor Pettie, nor Sheb—him that used to play the pianer. There was nobbut me, and I was moppin the floor and singin ‘Careless Love.’ Then the batwings screeked, so they did, they had this funny sound they made …”
Jake saw that Roland was nodding, a trace of a smile on his lips.
“I looked up,” Sheemie resumed, “and in come this boy.” His eyes shifted briefly to Jake, then back to the mouth of the cave. “He looked like you, young sai, so he did, close enough to be twim. But his face were covert wi’ blood and one of his eye’n were put out, spoiling his pretty, and he walked all a-limp. Looked like death, he did, and frighten’t me terrible, and made me sad to see him, too. I just kept moppin, thinkin that if I did that he might not never mind me, or even see me at all, and go away.”
Jake realized he knew this tale. Had he seen it? Had he actually been that bloody boy?
“But he looked right at you …” Roland murmured, still a-hunker, still looking out into the gloom.
“Aye, Will Dearborn that was, right at me, so he did, and said ‘Why must you hurt me, when I love you so? When I can do nothing else nor want to, for love made me and fed me and—’”
“‘And kept me in better days,’” Eddie murmured. A tear fell from one of his eyes and made a dark spot on the floor of the cave.
“‘—and kept me in better days? Why will you cut me, and disfigure my face, and fill me with woe? I have only loved you for your beauty as you once loved me for mine in the days before the world moved on. Now you scar me with nails and put burning drops of quicksilver in my nose; you have set the animals on me, so you have, and they have eaten of my softest parts. Around me the can-toi gather and there’s no peace from their laughter. Yet still I love you and would serve you and even bring the magic again, if you would allow me, for that is how my heart was cast when I rose from the Prim. And once I was strong as well as beautiful, but now my strength is almost gone.’”
“You cried,” Susannah said, and Jake thought: Of course he did. He was crying himself. So was Ted; so was Dinky Earnshaw. Only Roland was dry-eyed, and the gunslinger was pale, so pale.
“He wept,” said Sheemie (tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told his dream), “and I did, too, for I could see that he had been fair as daylight. He said, ‘If the torture were to stop now, I might still recover—if never my looks, then at least my strength—’”
“‘My kes, ’” Jake said, and although he’d never heard the word before he pronounced it correctly, almost as if it were kiss.
“‘—and my kes. But another week … or maybe five days … or even three … and it will be too late. Even if the torture stops, I’ll die. And you’ll die too, for when love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.’ Then the boy turned and went out. The batwing door made its same sound. Skree-eek.”
He looked at Jake, now, and smiled like one who has just awakened. “I can’t answer your question, sai.” He knocked a fist on his forehead. “Don’t have much in the way of brains up here, me—only cobwebbies. Cordelia Delgado said so, and I reckon she was right.”
Jake made no reply. He was dazed. He had dreamed about the same disfigured boy, but not in any saloon; it had been in Gage Park, the one where they’d seen Charlie the ChooChoo. Last night. Had to have been. He hadn’t remembered until now, would probably never have remembered if Sheemie hadn’t told his own dream. And had Roland, Eddie, and Susannah also had a version of the same dream? Yes. He could see it on their faces, just as he could see that Ted and Dinky looked moved but otherwise bewildered.
Roland stood up with a wince, clamped his hand briefly to his hip, then said, “Thankee-sai, Sheemie, you’ve helped us greatly.”
Sheemie smiled uncertainly. “How did I do that?”
“Never mind, my dear.” Roland turned his attention to Ted. “My friends and I are going to step outside briefly. We need to speak an-tet.”
“Of course,” Ted said. He shook his head as if to clear it.
“Do my peace of mind a favor and keep it short,” Dinky said. “We’re probably still all right, but I don’t want to push our luck.”
“Will you need him to jump you back inside?” Eddie asked, nodding to Sheemie. This was in the nature of a rhetorical question; how else would the three of them get back?
“Well, yeah, but …” Dinky began.
“Then you’ll be pushing your luck plenty.” That said, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake followed Roland out of the cave. Oy stayed behind, sitting with his new friend, Haylis of Chayven. Something about that troubled Jake. It wasn’t a feeling of jealousy but rather one o
f dread. As if he were seeing an omen someone wiser than himself—one of the Manni-folk, perhaps—could interpret. But would he want to know?
Perhaps not.
SIX
“I didn’t remember my dream until he told his,” Susannah said, “and if he hadn’t told his, I probably never would have remembered.”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“But I remember it clearly enough now,” she went on. “I was in a subway station and the boy came down the stairs—”
Jake said, “I was in Gage Park—”
“And I was at the Markey Avenue playground, where me and Henry used to play one-on-one,” Eddie said. “In my dream, the kid with the bloody face was wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT—”
“—IN MID-WORLD,” Jake finished, and Eddie gave him a startled look.
Jake barely noticed; his thoughts had turned in another direction. “I wonder if Stephen King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot rise.”
This was a question none of them could answer.
“Roland?” Eddie asked. “Where were you in your dream?”
“The Travellers’ Rest, where else? Wasn’t I there with Sheemie, once upon a time?” With my friends, now long gone, he could have added, but did not. “I was sitting at the table Eldred Jonas used to favor, playing one-hand Watch Me.”
Susannah said quietly, “The boy in the dream was the Beam, wasn’t he?”
As Roland nodded, Jake realized that Sheemie had told them which task came first, after all. Had told them beyond all doubt.
“Do any of you have a question?” Roland asked.
One by one, his companions shook their heads.