by Stephen King
With the help of the rest, Sheemie could have held the hole open a good while longer (the others had been staring into the brilliance of that bustling New York night with a kind of hungry amazement, not Breaking now but Opening, Seeing), only there turned out to be no need for that. Following the baseball score, the date and time had gone speeding past them in brilliant yellow-green letters a story high: JUNE 18, 1999 9:19 PM.
Jake opened his mouth to ask how they could be sure they had been looking into Keystone World, the one where Stephen King had less than a day to live, and then shut it again. The answer was in the time, stupid, as the answer always was: the numbers comprising 9:19 also added up to nineteen.
THIRTEEN
“And how long ago was it that you saw this?” Roland asked.
Dinky calculated. “Had to’ve been five hours, at least. Based on when the change-of-shifts horn blew and the sun went out for the night.”
Which should make it two-thirty in the morning right now on the other side, Jake calculated, counting the hours on his fingers. Thinking was hard now, even simple addition slowed by constant thoughts of Eddie, but he found he could do it if he really tried. Only you can’t depend on its only being five hours, because time goes faster on America-side. That may change now that the Breakers have quit beating up on the Beam—it may equalize—but probably not yet. Right now it’s probably still running fast.
And it might slip.
One minute Stephen King could be sitting in front of his typewriter in his office on the morning of June 19th, fine as paint, and the next … boom! Lying in a nearby funeral parlor that evening, eight or twelve hours gone by in a flash, his grieving family sitting in their own circle of lamplight and trying to decide what kind of service King would’ve wanted, always assuming that information wasn’t in his will; maybe even trying to decide where he’d be buried. And the Dark Tower? Stephen King’s version of the Dark Tower? Or Gan’s version, or the Prim’s version? Lost forever, all of them. And that sound you hear? Why, that must be the Crimson King, laughing and laughing and laughing from somewhere deep in the Discordia. And maybe Mordred the Spider-Boy, laughing along with him.
For the first time since Eddie’s death, something besides grief came to the forefront of Jake’s mind. It was a faint ticking sound, like the one the Sneetches had made when Roland and Eddie programmed them. Just before giving them to Haylis to plant, this had been. It was the sound of time, and time was not their friend.
“He’s right,” Jake said. “We have to go while we can still do something.”
Ted: “Will Susannah—”
“No,” Roland said. “Susannah will stay here, and you’ll help her bury Eddie. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Ted said. “Of course, if that’s how you’d have it.”
“If we’re not back in …” Roland calculated, one eye squinted shut, the other looking off into the darkness. “If we’re not back by this time on the night after next, assume that we’ve come back to End-World at Fedic.” Yes, assume Fedic, Jake thought. Of course. Because what good would it do to make the other, even more logical assumption, that we’re either dead or lost between the worlds, todash forever?
“Do’ee ken Fedic?” Roland was asking.
“South of here, isn’t it?” asked Worthington. He had wandered over with Dani, the pre-teen girl. “Or what was south? Trampas and a few of the other can-toi used to talk of it as though it were haunted.”
“It’s haunted, all right,” Roland said grimly. “Can you put Susannah on a train to Fedic in the event that we’re not able to come back here? I know that at least some trains must still run, because of—”
“The Greencloaks?” Dinky said, nodding. “Or the Wolves, as you think of them. All the D-line trains still run. They’re automated.”
“Are they monos? Do they talk?” Jake asked. He was thinking of Blaine.
Dinky and Ted exchanged a doubtful look, then Dinky returned his attention to Jake and shrugged. “How would we know? I probably know more about D-cups than D-lines, and I think that’s true of everyone here. The Breakers, at least. I suppose some of the guards might know something more. Or that guy.” He jerked a thumb at Tassa, who was still sitting on the stoop of Warden’s House, head in hands.
“In any case, we’ll tell Susannah to be careful,” Roland murmured to Jake. Jake nodded. He supposed that was the best they could do, but he had another question. He made a mental note to ask either Ted or Dinky, if he got a chance to do so without being overheard by Roland. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Susannah behind—every instinct of his heart cried out against it — but he knew she would refuse to leave Eddie unburied, and Roland knew it, too. They could make her come, but only by binding and gagging her, and that would only make things worse than they were already.
“It might be,” Ted said, “that a few Breakers would be interested in taking the train-trip south with Susannah.”
Dani nodded. “We’re not exactly loved around here for helping you out,” she said. “Ted and Dinky are getting it the worst, but somebody spit at me half an hour ago, while I was in my room, getting this.” She held up a battered-looking and clearly much-loved Pooh Bear. “I don’t think they’ll do anything while you guys are around, but after you go …” She shrugged.
“Man, I don’t get that,” Jake said. “They’re free.”
“Free to do what?” Dinky asked. “Think about it. Most of them were misfits on America-side. Fifth wheels. Over here we were VIPs, and we got the best of everything. Now all that’s gone. When you think about it that way, is it so hard to understand?”
“Yes,” Jake said bluntly. He supposed he didn’t want to understand.
“They lost something else, too,” Ted told them quietly. “There’s a novel by Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451. ‘It was a pleasure to burn’ is that novel’s first line. Well, it was a pleasure to Break, as well.”
Dinky was nodding. So were Worthington and Dani Rostov.
Even Sheemie was nodding his head.
FOURTEEN
Eddie lay in that same circle of light, but now his face was clean and the top sheet of the proctor’s bed had been folded neatly down to his midsection. Susannah had dressed him in a clean white shirt she’d found somewhere (in the proctor’s closet was Jake’s guess), and she must have found a razor, too, because his cheeks were smooth. Jake tried to imagine her sitting here and shaving the face of her dead husband—singing “Commala-come-come, the rice has just begun” as she did it— and at first he couldn’t. Then, all at once, the image came to him, and it was so powerful that he had to struggle once again to keep from bursting into sobs.
She listened quietly as Roland spoke to her, sitting on the side of the bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast. To the gunslinger she looked like a shy virgin receiving a marriage proposal.
When he had finished, she said nothing.
“Do you understand what I’ve told you, Susannah?”
“Yes,” she said, still without looking up. “I’m to bury my man. Ted and Dinky will help me, if only to keep their friends—” she gave this word a bitterly sarcastic little twist that actually encouraged Roland a bit; she was in there after all, it seemed “—from taking him away from me and lynching his body from a sour apple tree.”
“And then?”
“Either you’ll find a way to come back here and we’ll return to Fedic together, or Ted and Dinky will put me on the train and I’ll go there alone.”
Jake didn’t just hate the cold disconnection in her voice; it terrified him, as well. “You know why we have to go back to the other side, don’t you?” he asked anxiously. “I mean, you know, don’t you?”
“To save the writer while there’s still time.” She had picked up one of Eddie’s hands, and Jake noted with fascination that his nails were perfectly clean. What had she used to get the dirt out from beneath them, he wondered—had the proctor had one of those little nail-care gadgets, like the one his father always kept on a k
eychain in his pocket? “Sheemie says we’ve saved the Beam of Bear and Turtle. We think we’ve saved the rose. But there’s at least one more job to do. The writer. The lazybones writer.” Now she did look up, and her eyes flashed. Jake suddenly thought it might be good that Susannah wouldn’t be with them when—if—they met sai Stephen King.
“You bettah save him,” she said. Both Roland and Jake could hear old sneak-thief Detta creeping into her voice. “After what’s happened today, you just bettah. And this time, Roland, you tell him not to stop with his writin. Not come hell, high water, cancer, or gangrene of the dick. Never mind worryin about the Pulitzer Prize, neither. You tell him to go on and be done with his motherfuckin story.”
“I will pass the message on,” Roland said.
She nodded.
“You’ll come to us when this job is finished,” Roland said, and his voice rose just slightly on the last word, almost turning it into a question. “You’ll come with us and finish the final job, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Not because I want to — all the spit and git is out of me—but because he wanted me to.” Gently, very gently, she put Eddie’s hand back on his chest with the other one. Then she pointed a finger at Roland. The tip trembled minutely. “Just don’t start up with any of that ‘we are ka-tet, we are one from many’ crap. Because those days are gone. Ain’t they?”
“Yes,” Roland said. “But the Tower still stands. And waits.” “Lost my taste for that, too, big boy.” Not quite los’ mah tase fo’ dat, too, but almost. “Tell you the truth.”
But Jake realized that she was not telling the truth. She hadn’t lost her desire to see the Dark Tower any more than Roland had. Any more than Jake had himself. Their tet might be broken, but ka remained. And she felt it just as they did.
FIFTEEN
They kissed her (and Oy licked her face) before leaving.
“You be careful, Jake,” Susannah said. “Come back safe, hear? Eddie would have told you the same.”
“I know,” Jake said, and then kissed her again. He was smiling because he could hear Eddie telling him to watch his ass, it was cracked already, and starting to cry once more for the same reason. Susannah held him tight a moment longer, then let him go and turned back to her husband, lying so still and cold in the proctor’s bed. Jake understood that she had little time for Jake Chambers or Jake Chambers’s grief just now. Her own was too big.
SIXTEEN
Outside the suite, Dinky waited by the door. Roland was walking on with Ted, the two of them already at the end of the corridor and deep in conversation. Jake supposed they were headed back to the Mall, where Sheemie (with a little help from the others) would attempt to send them once more to America-side. That reminded him of something.
“The D-line trains go south,” Jake said. “Or what’s supposed to be south—is that right?”
“More or less, partner,” Dinky said. “Some of the engines have got names, like Delicious Rain or Spirit of the Snow Country, but they’ve all got letters and numbers.”
“Does the D stand for Dandelo?” Jake asked.
Dinky looked at him with a puzzled frown. “Dandelo? What in the hell is that?”
Jake shook his head. He didn’t even want to tell Dinky where he’d heard the word.
“Well, I don’t know, not for sure,” Dinky said as they resumed walking, “but I always assumed the D stood for Discordia. Because that’s where all the trains supposedly end up, you know—somewhere deep in the universe’s baddest Badlands.”
Jake nodded. D for Discordia. That made sense. Sort of, anyway.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Dinky said. “What’s a Dandelo?”
“Just a word I saw written on the wall in Thunderclap Station. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
SEVENTEEN
Outside Corbett Hall, a delegation of Breakers waited. They looked grim and frightened. D for Dandelo, Jake thought. D for Discordia. Also D for desperate.
Roland faced them with his arms folded over his chest. “Who speaks for you?” he asked. “If one speaks, let him come forward now, for our time here is up.”
A gray-haired gentleman—another bankerly-looking fellow, in truth — stepped forward. He was wearing gray suit-pants, a white shirt open at the collar, and a gray vest, also open. The vest sagged. So did the man wearing it.
“You’ve taken our lives from us,” he said. He spoke these words with a kind of morose satisfaction—as if he’d always known it would come to this (or something like this). “The lives we knew. What will you give back in return, Mr. Gilead?”
There was a rumble of approval at this. Jake Chambers heard it and was suddenly more angry than ever before in his life. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, stole to the handle of the Coyote machine-pistol, caressed it, and found a cold comfort in its shape. Even a brief respite from grief. And Roland knew, for he reached behind him without looking and put his hand on top of Jake’s. He squeezed until Jake let loose of the gun.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll give, since you ask,” Roland said. “I meant to have this place, where you have fed on the brains of helpless children in order to destroy the universe, burned to the ground; aye, every stick of it. I intended to set certain flying balls that have come into our possession to explode, and blow apart anything that would not burn. I intended to point you the way to the River Whye and the green Callas which lie beyond it, and set you on with a curse my father taught me: may you live long, but not in good health.”
A resentful murmur greeted this, but not an eye met Roland’s own. The man who had agreed to speak for them (and even in his rage, Jake gave him points for courage) was swaying on his feet, as if he might soon faint away.
“The Callas still lie in that direction,” Roland said, and pointed. “If you go, some—many, even—may die on the way, for there are animals out there that are hungry, and what water there is may be poison. I’ve no doubt the Calla-folken will know who you are and what you’ve been about even if you lie, for they have the Manni among them and the Manni see much. Yet you may find forgiveness there rather than death, for the capacity for forgiveness in the hearts of such people is beyond the capacity of hearts such as yours to understand. Or mine, for that matter.
“That they would put you to work and that the rest of your lives would pass not in the comfort you’ve known but in toil and sweat I have no doubt, yet I urge you to go, if only to find some redemption for what you have done.”
“We didn’t know what we were doing, ye chary man!” a woman in the back yelled furiously.
“YOU KNEW!” Jake shouted back, screaming so loudly that he saw black dots in front of his eyes, and Roland’s hand was once again instantly over his to stay his draw. Would he actually have sprayed the crowd with the Coyote, bringing more death to this terrible place? He didn’t know. What he did know was that a gunslinger’s hands were sometimes not under his control once a weapon was in them. “Don’t you dare say you didn’t! You knew!”
“I’ll give this much, may it do ya,” Roland said. “My friends and I—those who survive, although I’m sure the one who lies dead yonder would agree, which is why I speak as I do—will let this place stand. There’s food enough to see you through the rest of your lives, I have no doubt, and robots to cook it and wash your clothes and even wipe your asses, if that’s what you think you need. If you prefer purgatory to redemption, then stay here. Were I you, I’d make the trek instead. Follow the railroad tracks out of the shadows. Tell them what you did before they can tell you, and get on your knees with your heads bared, and beg their forgiveness.”
“Never!” someone shouted adamantly, but Jake thought some of the others looked unsure.
“As you will,” said Roland. “I’ve spoken my last word on it, and the next who speaks back to me may remain silent ever after, for one of my friends is preparing another, her husband, to lie in the ground and I am full of grief and rage. Would you speak more? Would you dare my rage? If so, you dare
this.” He drew his gun and laid it in the hollow of his shoulder. Jake stepped up beside him, at last drawing his own.
There was a moment of silence, and then the man who had spoken turned away.
“Don’t shoot us, mister, you’ve done enough,” someone said bitterly.
Roland made no reply and the crowd began to disperse. Some went running, and the others caught that like a cold. They fled in silence, except for a few who were weeping, and soon the dark had swallowed them up.
“Wow,” Dinky said. His voice was soft and respectful.
“Roland,” Ted said. “What they did wasn’t entirely their fault. I thought I had explained that, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”
Roland holstered his revolver. “You did an excellent job,” he said. “That’s why they’re still alive.”
Now they had the Damli House end of the Mall to themselves again, and Sheemie limped up to Roland. His eyes were round and solemn. “Will you show me where you’d go, dear?” he asked. “Can you show me the place?”
The place. Roland had been so fixed on the when that he’d scarcely thought of the where. And his memories of the road they had traveled in Lovell were pretty skimpy. Eddie had been driving John Cullum’s car, and Roland had been deep in his own thoughts, concentrating on the things he would say to convince the caretaker to help them.
“Did Ted show you a place before you sent him on?” he asked Sheemie.
“Aye, so he did. Only he didn’t know he was showing me. It was a baby-picture …I don’t know how to tell you, exactly … stupid head! Full of cobwebbies!” Sheemie made a fist and clouted himself between the eyes.
Roland took the hand before Sheemie could hit himself again and unrolled the fingers. He did this with surprising gentleness. “No, Sheemie. I think I understand. You found a thought …a memory from when he was a little boy.”