by Stephen King
Jake had seen a lot of death since being drawn to Mid-World; had dealt it; had even experienced his own, although he remembered very little of that. But this was the death of a ka-mate, and what had been going on in the bedroom of the proctor’s suite just seemed pointless. And endless. Jake wished with all his heart that he’d stayed outside with Dinky; he didn’t want to remember his wisecracking, occasionally hot-tempered friend this way.
For one thing, Eddie looked worse than frail as he lay in the proctor’s bed with his hand in Susannah’s; he looked old and (Jake hated to think of it) stupid. Or maybe the word was senile. His mouth had folded in at the corners, making deep dimples. Susannah had washed his face, but the stubble on his cheeks made them look dirty anyway. There were big purple patches beneath his eyes, almost as though that bastard Prentiss had beaten him up before shooting him. The eyes themselves were closed, but they rolled almost ceaselessly beneath the thin veils of his lids, as though Eddie were dreaming.
And he talked. A steady low muttering stream of words. Some of the things he said Jake could make out, some he couldn’t. Some of them made at least minimal sense, but a lot of it was what his friend Benny would have called ki’come: utter nonsense. From time to time Susannah would wet a rag in the basin on the table beside the bed, wring it out, and wipe her husband’s brow and dry lips. Once Roland got up, took the basin, emptied it in the bathroom, refilled it, and brought it back to her. She thanked him in a low and perfectly pleasant tone of voice. A little later Jake had freshened the water, and she thanked him in the same way. As if she didn’t even know they were there.
We go for her, Roland had told Jake. Because later on she’ll remember who was there, and be grateful.
But would she? Jake wondered now, in the darkness outside the Clover Tavern. Would she be grateful? It was down to Roland that Eddie Dean was lying on his deathbed at the age of twenty-five or -six, wasn’t it? On the other hand, if not for Roland, she would never have met Eddie in the first place. It was all too confusing. Like the idea of multiple worlds with New Yorks in every one, it made Jake’s head ache.
Lying there on his deathbed, Eddie had asked his brother Henry why he never remembered to box out.
He’d asked Jack Andolini who hit him with the ugly-stick.
He’d shouted, “Look out, Roland, it’s Big-Nose George, he’s back!”
And “Suze, if you can tell him the one about Dorothy and the Tin Woodman, I’ll tell him all the rest.”
And, chilling Jake’s heart: “I do not shoot with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.”
At that last one, Roland had taken Eddie’s hand in the gloom (for the shades had been drawn) and squeezed it. “Aye, Eddie, you say true. Will you open your eyes and see my face, dear?”
But Eddie hadn’t opened his eyes. Instead, chilling Jake’s heart more deeply yet, the young man who now wore a useless bandage about his head had murmured, “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.”
After that there was nothing intelligible for awhile, only that ceaseless muttering. Jake had refilled the basin of water, and when he had come back, Roland saw his drawn white face and told him he could go.
“But—”
“Go on and go, sugarbunch,” Susannah said. “Only be careful. Might still be some of em out there, looking for payback.”
“But how will I—”
“I’ll call you when it’s time,” Roland said, and tapped Jake’s temple with one of the remaining fingers on his right hand. “You’ll hear me.”
Jake had wanted to kiss Eddie before leaving, but he was afraid. Not that he might catch death like a cold—he knew better than that—but afraid that even the touch of his lips might be enough to push Eddie into the clearing at the end of the path.
And then Susannah might blame him.
SIX
Outside in the hallway, Dinky asked him how it was going.
“Real bad,” Jake said. “Do you have another cigarette?”
Dinky raised his eyebrows but gave Jake a smoke. The boy tamped it on his thumbnail, as he’d seen the gunslinger do with tailor-made smokes, then accepted a light and inhaled deeply. The smoke still burned, but not so harshly as the first time. His head only swam a little and he didn’t cough. Pretty soon I’ll be a natural, he thought. If I ever make it back to New York, maybe I can go to work for the Network, in my Dad’s department. I’m already getting good at The Kill.
He lifted the cigarette in front of his eyes, a little white missile with smoke issuing from the top instead of the bottom. The word CAMEL was written just below the filter. “I told myself I’d never do this,” Jake told Dinky. “Never in life. And here I am with one in my hand.” He laughed. It was a bitter laugh, an adult laugh, and the sound of it coming out of his mouth made him shiver.
“I used to work for this guy before I came here,” Dinky said. “Mr. Sharpton, his name was. He used to tell me that never ’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.”
Jake made no reply. He was thinking of how Eddie had talked about the rooms of ruin. Jake had followed Mia into a room like that, once upon a time and in a dream. Now Mia was dead. Callahan was dead. And Eddie was dying. He thought of all the bodies lying out there under blankets while thunder rolled like bones in the distance. He thought of the man who’d shot Eddie snap-rolling to the left as Roland’s bullet finished him off. He tried to remember the welcoming party for them back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the music and dancing and colored torches, but all that came clear was the death of Benny Slightman, another friend. Tonight the world seemed made of death.
He himself had died and come back: back to Mid-World and back to Roland. All afternoon he had tried to believe the same thing might happen to Eddie and knew somehow that it would not. Jake’s part in the tale had not been finished. Eddie’s was. Jake would have given twenty years of his life—thirty!— not to believe that, but he did. He supposed he had progged it somehow.
The rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.
Jake knew a spider. Was Mia’s child watching all of this? Having fun? Maybe rooting for one side or the other, like a fucking Yankee fan in the bleachers?
He is. I know he is. I feel him.
“Are you all right, kiddo?” Dinky asked.
“No,” Jake said. “Not all right.” And Dinky nodded as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer. Well, Jake thought, probably he expected it. He’s a telepath, after all.
As if to underline this, Dinky had asked who Mordred was.
“You don’t want to know,” Jake said. “Believe me.” He snuffed his cigarette half-smoked (“All your lung cancer’s right here, in the last quarter-inch,” his father used to say in tones of absolute certainty, pointing to one of his own filterless cigarettes like a TV pitchman) and left Corbett Hall. He used the back door, hoping to avoid the cluster of waiting, anxious Breakers, and in that he had succeeded. Now he was in Pleasantville, sitting on the curb like one of the homeless people you saw back in New York, waiting to be called. Waiting for the end.
He thought about going into the tavern, maybe to draw himself a beer (surely if he was old enough to smoke and to kill people from ambush he was old enough to drink a beer), maybe just to see if the jukebox would play without change. He bet that Algul Siento had been what his Dad had claimed America would become in time, a cashless society, and that old Seeberg was rigged so you only had to push the buttons in order to start the music. And he bet that if he looked at the song-strip next to 19, he’d see “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” by Elton John.
He got to his feet, and that was when the call came. Nor was he the only one who heard it; Oy let go a short, hurt-sounding yip. Roland might have been standing right next to them.
To me, Jake, and hurry. He’s going.
SEVEN
Jake hurried back down one of t
he alleys, skirted the still-smoldering Warden’s House (Tassa the houseboy, who had either ignored Roland’s order to leave or hadn’t been informed of it, was sitting silently on the stoop in a kilt and a sweatshirt, his head in his hands), and began to trot up the Mall, sparing a quick and troubled glance at the long line of dead bodies. The little séance-circle he’d seen earlier was gone.
I won’t cry, he promised himself grimly. If I’m old enough to smoke and think about drawing myself a beer, I’m old enough to control my stupid eyes. I won’t cry.
Knowing he almost certainly would.
EIGHT
Sheemie and Ted had joined Dinky outside the proctor’s suite. Dinky had given up his seat to Sheemie. Ted looked tired, but Sheemie looked like shit on a cracker to Jake: eyes bloodshot again, a crust of dried blood around his nose and one ear, cheeks leaden. He had taken off one of his slippers and was massaging his foot as though it pained him. Yet he was clearly happy. Maybe even exalted.
“Beam says all may yet be well, young Jake,” Sheemie said. “Beam says not too late. Beam says thankya.”
“That’s good,” Jake said, reaching for the doorknob. He barely heard what Sheemie was saying. He was concentrating
(won’t cry and make it harder for her )
on controlling his emotions once he was inside. Then Sheemie said something that brought him back in a hurry.
“Not too late in the Real World, either,” Sheemie said. “We know. We peeked. Saw the moving sign. Didn’t we, Ted?”
“Indeed we did.” Ted was holding a can of Nozz-A-La in his lap. Now he raised it and took a sip. “When you get in there, Jake, tell Roland that if it’s June 19th of ‘99 you’re interested in, you’re still okay. But the margin’s commencing to get a little thin.”
“I’ll tell him,” Jake said.
“And remind him that time sometimes slips over there. Slips like an old transmission. That’s apt to continue for quite awhile, regardless of the Beam’s recovery. And once the 19th is gone …”
“It can never come again,” Jake said. “Not there. We know.” He opened the door and slipped into the darkness of the proctor’s suite.
NINE
A single circle of stringent yellow light, thrown by the lamp on the bedtable, lay upon Eddie Dean’s face. It cast the shadow of his nose on his left cheek and turned his closed eyes into dark sockets. Susannah was kneeling on the floor beside him, holding both of his hands in both of hers and looking down at him. Her shadow ran long upon the wall. Roland sat on the other side of the bed, in deep shadow. The dying man’s long, muttered monologue had ceased, and his respiration had lost all semblance of regularity. He would snatch a deep breath, hold it, then let it out in a lengthy, whistling whoosh. His chest would lie still so long that Susannah would look up into his face, her eyes shining with anxiety until the next long, tearing breath had begun.
Jake sat down on the bed next to Roland, looked at Eddie, looked at Susannah, then looked hesitantly into the gunslinger’s face. In the gloom he could see nothing there except weariness.
“Ted says to tell you it’s almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya. Also that time could slip a notch.”
Roland nodded. “Yet we’ll wait for this to be finished, I think. It won’t be much longer, and we owe him that.”
“How much longer?” Jake murmured.
“I don’t know. I thought he might be gone before you got here, even if you ran—”
“I did, once I got to the grassy part—”
“—but, as you see …”
“He fights hard,” Susannah said, and that this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. “My man fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say.”
TEN
And so he did. Five endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie’s eyes opened. “Sue …” He said, “Su …sie—”
She leaned close, still holding his hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration fiercely narrowed. And with an effort Jake wouldn’t have believed possible, Eddie freed one of his hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed no sign. The smile that bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps even sensuous.
“Eddie! Welcome back!”
“Don’t bullshit …a bullshitter,” he whispered. “I’m goin, sweetheart, not comin.”
“That’s just plain sil—”
“Hush,” he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. “I … will … wait for you,” he said, forcing each word out with immense effort.
Jake saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body’s last message to the living world, and that was when the boy’s heart finally understood what his head had known for hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and scoured. When Roland took his hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to Eddie, it could happen to anybody. It could happen to him.
“Yes, Eddie. I know you’ll wait,” she said.
“In …” He pulled in another of those great, wretched, rasping breaths. His eyes were as brilliant as gemstones. “In the clearing.” Another breath. Hand holding her hair. Lamplight casting them both in its mystic yellow circle. “The one at the end of the path.”
“Yes, dear.” Her voice was calm now, but a tear fell on Eddie’s cheek and ran slowly down to the line of jaw. “I hear you very well. Wait for me and I’ll find you and we’ll go together. I’ll be walking then, on my own legs.”
Eddie smiled at her, then turned his eyes to Jake.
“Jake … to me.”
No, Jake thought, panicked, no, I can’t, I can’t.
But he was already leaning close, into that smell of the end. He could see the fine line of grit just below Eddie’s hairline turning to paste as more tiny droplets of sweat sprang up.
“Wait for me, too,” Jake said through numb lips. “Okay, Eddie? We’ll all go on together. We’ll be ka-tet, just like we were.” He tried to smile and couldn’t. His heart hurt too much for smiling. He wondered if it might not explode in his chest, the way stones sometimes exploded in a hot fire. He had learned that little fact from his friend Benny Slightman. Benny’s death had been bad, but this was a thousand times worse. A million.
Eddie was shaking his head. “Not … so fast, buddy.” He drew in another breath and then grimaced, as if the air had grown quills only he could feel. He whispered then—not from weakness, Jake thought later, but because this was just between them. “Watch … for Mordred. Watch … Dandelo.”
“Dandelion? Eddie, I don’t—”
“Dandelo.” Eyes widening. Enormous effort. “Protect … your … dinh …from Mordred. From Dandelo. You … Oy. Your job.” His eyes cut toward Roland, then back to Jake. “Shhh.” Then: “Protect …”
“I…I will. We will.”
Eddie nodded a little, then looked at Roland. Jake moved aside and the gunslinger leaned in for Eddie’s word to him.
ELEVEN
Never, ever, had Roland seen an eye so bright, not even on Jericho Hill, when Cuthbert had bade him a laughing goodbye.
Eddie smiled. “We had … some times.”
Roland nodded again.
“You…you …” But this Eddie couldn’t finish. He raised one hand and made a weak twirling motion.
“I danced,” Roland said, nodding. “Danced the commala.”
Yes, Eddie mouthed, then drew in another of those whooping, painful breaths. It was the last.
“Thank you for my second chance,” he said. “Thank you … Father.”
That was all. Eddie’s eyes still looked at him, and they were still aware, but he had no breath to replace the one expended on that final word, that father. The lamplight gleamed on the hairs of his bare arms, turning them to gold. The thunder murmured. Then Eddie’s eyes closed and he
laid his head to one side. His work was finished. He had left the path, stepped into the clearing. They sat around him a-circle, but ka-tet no more.
TWELVE
And so, thirty minutes later.
Roland, Jake, Ted, and Sheemie sat on a bench in the middle of the Mall. Dani Rostov and the bankerly-looking fellow were nearby. Susannah was in the bedroom of the proctor’s suite, washing her husband’s body for burial. They could hear her from where they were sitting. She was singing. All the songs seemed to be ones they’d heard Eddie singing along the trail. One was “Born to Run.” Another was “The Rice Song,” from Calla Bryn Sturgis.
“We have to go, and right away,” Roland said. His hand had gone to his hip and was rubbing, rubbing. Jake had seen him take a bottle of aspirin (gotten God knew where) from his purse and dry-swallow three. “Sheemie, will you send us on?”
Sheemie nodded. He had limped to the bench, leaning on Dinky for support, and still none of them had had a chance to look at the wound on his foot. His limp seemed so minor compared to their other concerns; surely if Sheemie Ruiz were to die this night it would be as a result of opening a makeshift door between Thunder-side and America. Another strenuous act of teleportation might be lethal to him—what was a sore foot compared to that?
“I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll try my very hardest, so I will.”
“Those who helped us look into New York will help us do this,” Ted said.
It was Ted who had figured out how to determine the current when on America-side of the Keystone World. He, Dinky, Fred Worthington (the bankerly-looking man), and Dani Rostov had all been to New York, and were all able to summon up clear mental images of Times Square: the lights, the crowds, the movie marquees … and, most important, the giant news-ticker which broadcast the events of the day to the crowds below, making a complete circuit of Broadway and Forty-eighth Street every thirty seconds or so. The hole had opened long enough to inform them that UN forensics experts were examining supposed mass graves in Kosovo, that Vice President Gore had spent the day in New York City campaigning for President, that Roger Clemens had struck out thirteen Texas Rangers but the Yankees had still lost the night before.