Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  He caught movement from the corner of his eye as he did so and saw another one—the boss of the show—had struggled up onto one elbow. His gun, the Peacemaker .40 that had once executed a rapist, was leveled. Eddie’s reflexes were quick, but there was no time to use them. The Peacemaker roared a single time, fire licking from the end of its barrel, and blood flew from Eddie Dean’s brow. A lock of hair flipped on the back of his head as the slug exited. He slapped his hand to the hole that had appeared over his right eye, like a man who has remembered something of vital importance just a little too late.

  Roland whirled on the rundown heels of his boots, pulling his own gun in a dip too quick to see. Jake and Susannah also turned. Susannah saw her husband standing in the street with the heel of his hand pressed to his brow.

  “Eddie? Sugar?”

  Pimli was struggling to cock the Peacemaker again, his upper lip curled back from his teeth in a doglike snarl of effort. Roland shot him in the throat and Algul Siento’s Master snap-rolled to his left, the still-uncocked pistol flying out of his hand and clattering to a stop beside the body of his friend the Weasel. It finished almost at Eddie’s feet.

  “Eddie!” Susannah screamed, and began a loping crawl toward him, thrusting herself on her hands. He’s not hurt bad, she told herself, not hurt bad, dear God don’t let my man be hurt bad—

  Then she saw the blood running from beneath his pressing hand, pattering down into the street, and knew it was bad.

  “Suze?” he asked. His voice was perfectly clear. “Suzie, where are you? I can’t see.”

  He took one step, a second, a third … and then fell facedown in the street, just as Gran-pere Jaffords had known he would, aye, from the first moment he’d laid eyes on him. For the boy was a gunslinger, say true, and it was the only end that one such as he could expect.

  CHAPTER XII:

  THE TET BREAKS

  ONE

  That night found Jake Chambers sitting disconsolately outside the Clover Tavern at the east end of Main Street in Pleasantville. The bodies of the guards had been carted away by a robot maintenance crew, and that was at least something of a relief. Oy had been in the boy’s lap for an hour or more. Ordinarily he would never have stayed so close for so long, but he seemed to understand that Jake needed him. On several occasions, Jake wept into the bumbler’s fur.

  For most of that endless day Jake found himself thinking in two different voices. This had happened to him before, but not for years; not since the time when, as a very young child, he suspected he might have suffered some sort of weird, below-the-parental-radar breakdown.

  Eddie’s dying, said the first voice (the one that used to assure him there were monsters in his closet, and soon they would emerge to eat him alive). He’s in a room in Corbett Hall and Susannah’s with him and he won’t shut up, but he’s dying.

  No, denied the second voice (the one that used to assure him—feebly—that there were no such things as monsters). No, that can’t be. Eddie’s … Eddie! And besides, he’s ka-tet. He might die when we reach the Dark Tower, we might all die when we get there, but not now, not here, that’s crazy.

  Eddie’s dying, replied the first voice. It was implacable. He’s got a hole in his head almost big enough to stick your fist in, and he’s dying.

  To this the second voice could offer only more denials, each weaker than the last.

  Not even the knowledge that they had likely saved the Beam (Sheemie certainly seemed to think they had; he’d crisscrossed the weirdly silent campus of the DevarToi, shouting the news— BEAM SAYS ALL MAY BE WELL! BEAM SAYS THANKYA!—at the top of his lungs) could make Jake feel better. The loss of Eddie was too great a price to pay even for such an outcome. And the breaking of the tet was an even greater price. Every time Jake thought of it, he felt sick to his stomach and sent up inarticulate prayers to God, to Gan, to the Man Jesus, to any or all of them to do a miracle and save Eddie’s life.

  He even prayed to the writer.

  Save my friend’s life and we’ll save yours, he prayed to Stephen King, a man he had never seen. Save Eddie and we won’t let that van hit you. I swear it.

  Then again he’d think of Susannah screaming Eddie’s name, of trying to turn him over, and Roland wrapping his arms around her and saying You mustn’t do that, Susannah, you mustn’t disturb him, and how she’d fought him, her face crazy, her face changing as different personalities seemed to inhabit it for a moment or two and then flee. I have to help him! she’d sob in the Susannah-voice Jake knew, and then in another, harsher voice she’d shout Let me go, mahfah! Let me do mah voodoo on him, make mah houngun, he goan git up an walk, you see! Sho! And Roland holding her through all of it, holding her and rocking her while Eddie lay in the street, but not dead, it would have been better, almost, if he’d been dead (even if being dead meant the end of talking about miracles, the end of hope), but Jake could see his dusty fingers twitching and could hear him muttering incoherently, like a man who talks in his sleep.

  Then Ted had come, and Dinky just behind him, and two or three of the other Breakers trailing along hesitantly behind them. Ted had gotten on his knees beside the struggling, screaming woman and motioned for Dinky to get kneebound on the other side of her. Ted had taken one of her hands, then nodded for Dink to take the other. And something had flowed out of them—something deep and soothing. It wasn’t meant for Jake, no, not at all, but he caught some of it, anyway, and felt his wildly galloping heart slow. He looked into Ted Brautigan’s face and saw that Ted’s eyes were doing their trick, the pupils swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.

  Susannah’s cries faltered, subsiding to little hurt groans. She looked down at Eddie, and when she bent her head her eyes had spilled tears onto the back of Eddie’s shirt, making dark places, like raindrops. That was when Sheemie appeared from one of the alleys, shouting glad hosannahs to all who would hear him —“BEAM SAYS NOT TOO LATE! BEAM SAYS JUST IN TIME, BEAM SAYS THANKYA AND WE MUST LET HIM HEAL!”— and limping badly on one foot (none of them thought anything of it then or even noticed it). Dinky murmured to the growing crowd of Breakers looking at the mortally wounded gunslinger, and several went to Sheemie and got him to quiet down. From the main part of the DevarToi the alarms continued, but the follow-up fire engines were actually getting the three worst fires (those in Damli House, Warden’s House, and Feveral Hall) under control.

  What Jake remembered next was Ted’s fingers—unbelievably gentle fingers—spreading the hair on the back of Eddie’s head and exposing a large hole filled with a dark jelly of blood. There were little white flecks in it. Jake had wanted to believe those flecks were bits of bone. Better than thinking they might be flecks of Eddie’s brain.

  At the sight of this terrible head-wound Susannah leaped to her feet and began to scream again. Began to struggle. Ted and Dinky (who was paler than paste) exchanged a glance, tightened their grip on her hands, and once more sent the

  (peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace )

  soothing message that was as much colors—cool blue shading to quiet ashes of gray—as it was words. Roland, meanwhile, held her shoulders.

  “Can anything be done for him?” Roland asked Ted. “Anything at all?”

  “He can be made comfortable,” Ted said. “We can do that much, at least.” Then he pointed toward the Devar. “Don’t you still have work there to finish, Roland?”

  For a moment Roland didn’t quite seem to understand that. Then he looked at the bodies of the downed guards, and did. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do. Jake, can you help me? If the ones left were to find a new leader and regroup … that wouldn’t do at all.”

  “What about Susannah?” Jake had asked.

  “Susannah’s going to help us see her man to a place where he can be at his ease, and die as peacefully as possible,” said Ted Brautigan. “Aren’t you, dear heart?”

  She’d looked at him with an expression that was not quite vacant; the understanding (and the pleading) in that gaze went into Jake�
��s heart like the tip of an icicle. “Must he die?” she had asked him.

  Ted had lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Yes,” he said. “He must die and you must bear it.”

  “Then you have to do something for me,” she said, and touched Ted’s cheek with her fingers. To Jake those fingers looked cold. Cold.

  “What, love? Anything I can.” He took hold of her fingers and wrapped them

  (peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace )

  in his own.

  “Stop what you’re doing, unless I tell you different,” said she.

  He looked at her, surprised. Then he glanced at Dinky, who only shrugged. Then he looked back at Susannah.

  “You mustn’t use your good-mind to steal my grief,” Susannah told him, “for I’d open my mouth and drink it to the dregs. Every drop.”

  For a moment Ted only stood with his head lowered and a frown creasing his brow. Then he looked up and gave her the sweetest smile Jake had ever seen.

  “Aye, lady,” Ted replied. “We’ll do as you ask. But if you need us … when you need us …”

  “I’ll call,” Susannah said, and once more slipped to her knees beside the muttering man who lay in the street.

  TWO

  As Roland and Jake approached the alley which would take them back to the center of the DevarToi, where they would put off mourning their fallen friend by taking care of any who might still stand against them, Sheemie reached out and plucked the sleeve of Roland’s shirt.

  “Beam says thankya, Will Dearborn that was.” He had blown out his voice with shouting and spoke in a hoarse croak. “Beam says all may yet be well. Good as new. Better.”

  “That’s fine,” Roland said, and Jake supposed it was. There had been no real joy then, however, as there was no real joy now. Jake kept thinking of the hole Ted Brautigan’s gentle fingers had exposed. That hole filled with red jelly.

  Roland put an arm around Sheemie’s shoulders, squeezed him, gave him a kiss. Sheemie smiled, delighted. “I’ll come with you, Roland. Will’ee have me, dear?”

  “Not this time,” Roland said.

  “Why are you crying?” Sheemie asked. Jake had seen the happiness draining from Sheemie’s face, being replaced with worry. Meanwhile, more Breakers were returning to Main Street, milling around in little groups. Jake had seen consternation in the expressions they directed toward the gunslinger … and a certain dazed curiosity … and, in some cases, clear dislike. Hate, almost. He had seen no gratitude, not so much as a speck of gratitude, and for that he’d hated them.

  “My friend is hurt,” Roland had said. “I cry for him, Sheemie. And for his wife, who is my friend. Will you go to Ted and sai Dinky, and try to soothe her, should she ask to be soothed?”

  “If you want, aye! Anything for you!”

  “Thankee-sai, son of Stanley. And help if they move my friend.”

  “Your friend Eddie! Him who lays hurt!”

  “Aye, his name is Eddie, you say true. Will you help Eddie?”

  “Aye!”

  “And there’s something else—”

  “Aye?” Sheemie asked, then seemed to remember something. “Aye! Help you go away, travel far, you and your friends! Ted told me. ‘Make a hole,’ he said, ‘like you did for me.’ Only they brought him back. The bad ‘uns. They’d not bring you back, for the bad ‘uns are gone! Beam’s at peace!” And Sheemie laughed, a jarring sound to Jake’s grieving ear.

  To Roland’s too, maybe, because his smile was strained. “In time, Sheemie … although I think Susannah may stay here, and wait for us to return.”

  If we do return, Jake thought.

  “But I have another chore you may be able to do. Not helping someone travel to that other world, but like that, a little. I’ve told Ted and Dinky, and they’d tell you, once Eddie’s been put at his ease. Will you listen?”

  “Aye! And help, if I can!”

  Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “Good!” Then Jake and the gunslinger had gone in a direction that might have been north, headed back to finish what they had begun.

  THREE

  They flushed out another fourteen guards in the next three hours, most of them humes. Roland surprised Jake—a little— by only killing the two who shot at them from behind the fire engine that had crashed with one wheel stuck in the cellar bulkhead. The rest he disarmed and then gave parole, telling them that any DevarToi guards still in the compound when the late-afternoon change-of-shifts horn blew would be shot out of hand.

  “But where will we go?” asked a taheen with a snowy-white rooster’s head below a great floppy-red coxcomb (he reminded Jake a little of Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon character).

  Roland shook his head. “I care not where you fetch,” he said, “as long as you’re not here when the next horn blows, kennit. You’ve done hell’s work here, but hell’s shut, and I mean to see it will never open this particular set of doors again.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the rooster-taheen, almost timidly, but Roland wouldn’t say, had only told the creature to pass on the message to any others he might run across.

  Most of the remaining taheen and can-toi left Algul Siento in pairs and triplets, going without argument and nervously looking back over their shoulders every few moments. Jake thought they were right to be afraid, because his dinh’s face that day had been abstract with thought and terrible with grief. Eddie Dean lay on his deathbed, and Roland of Gilead would not bear crossing.

  “What are you going to do to the place?” Jake asked after the afternoon horn had blown. They were making their way past the smoking husk of Damli House (where the robot firemen had posted signs every twenty feet reading OFF-LIMITS PENDING FIRE DEPT. INVESTIGATION), on their way to see Eddie.

  Roland only shook his head, not answering the question.

  On the Mall, Jake spied six Breakers standing in a circle, holding hands. They looked like folks having a séance. Sheemie was there, and Ted, and Dani Rostov; there also was a young woman, an older one, and a stout, bankerly-looking man. Beyond, lying with their feet sticking out under blankets, was a line of the nearly fifty guards who had died during the brief action.

  “Do you know what they’re doing?” Jake asked, meaning the séance-folken—the ones behind them were just being dead, a job that would occupy them from now on.

  Roland glanced toward the circle of Breakers briefly. “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Not now,” said the gunslinger. “Now we’re going to pay our respects to Eddie. You’re going to need all the serenity you can manage, and that means emptying your mind.”

  FOUR

  Now, sitting with Oy outside the empty Clover Tavern with its neon beer-signs and silent jukebox, Jake reflected on how right Roland had been, and how grateful Jake himself had been when, after forty-five minutes or so, the gunslinger had looked at him, seen his terrible distress, and excused him from the room where Eddie lingered, giving up his vitality an inch at a time, leaving the imprint of his remarkable will on every last inch of his life’s tapestry.

  The litter-bearing party Ted Brautigan had organized had borne the young gunslinger to Corbett Hall, where he was laid in the spacious bedroom of the first-floor proctor’s suite. The litter-bearers lingered in the dormitory’s courtyard, and as the afternoon wore on, the rest of the Breakers joined them. When Roland and Jake arrived, a pudgy redhaired woman stepped into Roland’s way.

  Lady, I wouldn’t do that, Jake had thought. Not this afternoon.

  In spite of the day’s alarums and excursions, this woman— who’d looked to Jake like the Lifetime President of his mother’s garden club—had found time to put on a fairly heavy coat of makeup: powder, rouge, and lipstick as red as the side of a Devar fire engine. She introduced herself as Grace Rumbelow (formerly of Aldershot, Hampshire, England) and demanded to know what was going to happen next—where they would go, what they would do, who would take care of them. The same questions the rooster-headed taheen had asked, in other words.
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  “For we have been taken care of,” said Grace Rumbelow in ringing tones (Jake had been fascinated with how she said “been,” so it rhymed with “seen”), “and are in no position, at least for the time being, to care for ourselves.”

  There were calls of agreement at this.

  Roland looked her up and down, and something in his face had robbed the lady of her measured indignation. “Get out of my road,” said the gunslinger, “or I’ll push you down.”

  She grew pale beneath her powder and did as he said without uttering another word. A birdlike clatter of disapproval followed Jake and Roland into Corbett Hall, but it didn’t start until the gunslinger was out of their view and they no longer had to fear falling beneath the unsettling gaze of his blue eyes. The Breakers reminded Jake of some kids with whom he’d gone to school at Piper, classroom nitwits willing to shout out stuff like this test sucks or bite my bag… but only when the teacher was out of the room.

  The first-floor hallway of Corbett was bright with fluorescent lights and smelled strongly of smoke from Damli House and Feveral Hall. Dinky Earnshaw was seated in a folding chair to the right of the door marked PROCTOR’S SUITE, smoking a cigarette. He looked up as Roland and Jake approached, Oy trotting along in his usual position just behind Jake’s heel.

  “How is he?” Roland asked.

  “Dying, man,” Dinky said, and shrugged.

  “And Susannah?”

  “Strong. Once he’s gone—” Dinky shrugged again, as if to say it could go either way, any way.

  Roland knocked quietly on the door.

  “Who is it?” Susannah’s voice, muffled.

  “Roland and Jake,” the gunslinger said. “Will you have us?”

  The question was met with what seemed to Jake an unusually long pause. Roland, however, didn’t seem surprised. Neither did Dinky, for that matter.

  At last Susannah said: “Come in.”

  They did.

  FIVE

  Sitting with Oy in the soothing dark, waiting for Roland’s call, Jake reflected on the scene that had met his eyes in the darkened room. That, and the endless three-quarters of an hour before Roland had seen his discomfort and let him go, saying he’d call Jake back when it was “time.”