by Stephen King
Yet a voice whispers to him just the same. Get off the main road, it says. Go on back to the house. You’ll have an extra hour before you have to meet the rest of them for the party on the other side of the lake. You can do some work. Maybe start the next Dark Tower story; you know it’s been on your mind.
Aye, so it has, but he already has a story to work on, and he likes it fine. Going back to the tale of the Tower means swimming in deep water. Maybe drowning there. Yet he suddenly realizes, standing here at this crossroads, that if he goes back early he will begin. He won’t be able to help himself. He’ll have to listen to what he sometimes thinks of as Ves’Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle (and sometimes as Susannah’s Song). He’ll junk the current story, turn his back on the safety of the land, and swim out into that dark water once again. He’s done it four times before, but this time he’ll have to swim all the way to the other side.
Swim or drown.
“No,” he says. He speaks aloud, and why not? There’s no one to hear him out here. He perceives, faintly, the attenuate sound of an approaching vehicle—or is it two? one on Route 7 and one on Warrington’s Road?—but that’s all.
“No,” he says again. “I’m gonna walk, and then I’m gonna party. No more writing today. Especially not that.”
And so, leaving the intersection behind, he begins making his way up the steep hill with its short sightline. He begins to walk toward the sound of the oncoming Dodge Caravan, which is also the sound of his oncoming death. The ka of the rational world wants him dead; that of the Prim wants him alive, and singing his song. So it is that on this sunny afternoon in western Maine, the irresistible force rushes toward the immovable object, and for the first time since the Prim receded, all worlds and all existence turn toward the Dark Tower which stands at the far end of Can’-Ka No Rey, which is to say the Red Fields of None. Even the Crimson King ceases his angry screaming. For it is the Dark Tower that will decide.
“Resolution demands a sacrifice,” King says, and although no one hears but the birds and he has no idea what this means, he is not disturbed. He’s always muttering to himself; it’s as though there is a Cave of Voices in his head, one full of brilliant—but not necessarily intelligent—mimics.
He walks, swinging his arms beside his bluejeaned thighs, unaware that his heart is
(isn’t)
finishing its last few beats, that his mind is
(isn’t)
thinking its last few thoughts, that his voices are
(aren’t)
making their last Delphic pronouncements.
“Ves’-Ka Gan,” he says, amused by the sound of it—yet attracted, too. He has promised himself that he’ll try not to stuff his Dark Tower fantasies with unpronounceable words in some made-up (not to say fucked-up) language—his editor, Chuck Verrill in New York, will only cut most of them if he does—but his mind seems to be filling up with such words and phrases all the same: ka, ka-tet, sai, soh, can-toi (that one at least is from another book of his, Desperation ), taheen. Can Tolkien’s Cirith Ungol and H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Blind Fiddler, Nyarlathotep, be far behind?
He laughs, then begins to sing a song one of his voices has given him. He thinks he will certainly use it in the next gunslinger book, when he finally allows the Turtle its voice again. “Commala-come-one,” he sings as he walks, “there’s a young man with a gun. That young man lost his honey when she took it on the run.”
And is that young man Eddie Dean? Or is it Jake Chambers?
“Eddie,” he says out loud. “Eddie’s the gunny with the honey.” He’s so deep in thought that at first he doesn’t see the roof of the blue Dodge Caravan as it comes over the short horizon ahead of him and so does not realize this vehicle is not on the highway at all, but on the soft shoulder where he is walking. Nor does he hear the oncoming roar of the pickup truck behind him.
EIGHTEEN
Bryan hears the scrape of the cooler’s lid even over the funky rip-rap beat of the music, and when he looks in the rearview mirror he’s both dismayed and outraged to see that Bullet, always the more forward of the two rotties, has leaped from the storage area at the rear of the van into the passenger compartment. Bullet’s rear legs are up on the dirty seat, his stubby tail is wagging happily, and his nose is buried in Bryan’s cooler.
At this point any reasonable driver would pull over to the side of the road, stop his vehicle, and take care of his wayward animal. Bryan Smith, however, has never gotten high marks for reason when behind the wheel, and has the driving record to prove it. Instead of pulling over, he twists around to the right, steering with his left hand and shoving ineffectually at the top of the rottweiler’s flat head with his right.
“Leave ’at alone!” he shouts at Bullet as his minivan drifts first toward the righthand shoulder and then onto it. “Din’ you hear me, Bullet? Are you foolish? Leave ’at alone!” He actually succeeds in shoving the dog’s head up for a moment, but there’s no fur for his fingers to grasp and Bullet, while no genius, is smart enough to know he has at least one more chance to grab the stuff in the white paper, the stuff radiating that entrancing red smell. He dips beneath Bryan’s hand and seizes the wrapped package of hamburger in his jaws.
“Drop it!” Bryan screams. “You drop it right … NOW!”
In order to gain the purchase necessary to twist further in the driver’s bucket, he presses down firmly with both feet. One of them, unfortunately, is on the accelerator. The van puts on a burst of speed as it rushes toward the top of the hill. At this moment, in his excitement and outrage, Bryan has completely forgotten where he is (Route 7) and what he’s supposed to be doing (driving a van). All he cares about is getting the package of meat out of Bullet’s jaws.
“Gimme it!” he shouts, tugging. Tail wagging more furiously than ever (to him it’s now a game as well as a meal), Bullet tugs back. There’s the sound of ripping butcher’s paper. The van is now all the way off the road. Beyond it is a grove of old pines lit by lovely afternoon light: a haze of green and gold. Bryan thinks only of the meat. He’s not going to eat hamburg with dog-drool on it, and you best believe it.
“Gimme it!” he says, not seeing the man in the path of his van, not seeing the truck that has now pulled up just behind the man, not seeing the truck’s passenger door open or the lanky cowboy-type who leaps out, a revolver with big yellow grips spilling from the holster on his hip and onto the ground as he does; Bryan Smith’s world has narrowed to one very bad dog and one package of meat. In the struggle for the meat, blood-roses are blooming on the butcher’s paper like tattoos.
NINETEEN
“There he is!” the boy named Jake shouted, but Irene Tassenbaum didn’t need him to tell her. Stephen King was wearing jeans, a chambray workshirt, and a baseball cap. He was well beyond the place where the road to Warrington’s intersected with Route 7, about a quarter of the way up the slope.
She punched the clutch, downshifted to Second like a NASCAR driver with the checkered flag in view, then turned hard left, hauling on the wheel with both hands. Chip McAvoy’s pickup truck teetered but did not roll. She saw the twinkle of sun on metal as a vehicle coming the other way reached the top of the hill King was climbing. She heard the man sitting by the door shout, “Pull in behind him!”
She did as he told her, even though she could now see that the oncoming vehicle was off the road and thus apt to broadside them. Not to mention crushing Stephen King in a metal sandwich between them.
The door popped open and the one named Roland half-rolled, half-jumped out of the truck.
After that, things happened very, very fast.
CHAPTER II:
VES’-KA GAN
ONE
What happened was lethally simple: Roland’s bad hip betrayed him. He went to his knees with a cry of mingled rage, pain, and dismay. Then the sunlight was blotted out as Jake leaped over him without so much as breaking stride. Oy was barking crazily from the cab of the truck: “Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake!”
“Jake,
no!” Roland shouted. He saw it all with a terrible clarity. The boy seized the writer around the waist as the blue vehicle—neither a truck nor a car but seemingly a cross between the two—bore down upon them in a roar of dissonant music. Jake turned King to the left, shielding him with his body, and so it was Jake the vehicle struck. Behind the gunslinger, who was now on his knees with his bleeding hands buried in the dirt, the woman from the store screamed.
“JAKE, NO!” Roland bellowed again, but it was too late. The boy he thought of as his son disappeared beneath the blue vehicle. The gunslinger saw one small upraised hand—would never forget it—and then that was gone, too. King, struck first by Jake and then by the weight of the van behind Jake, was thrown to the edge of the little grove of trees, ten feet from the point of impact. He landed on his right side, hitting his head on a stone hard enough to send the cap flying from his head. Then he rolled over, perhaps intending to try for his feet. Or perhaps intending nothing at all; his eyes were shocked zeroes.
The driver hauled on his vehicle’s steering wheel and it slipped past on Roland’s left, missing him by inches, merely throwing dust into his face instead of running him down. By then it was slowing, the driver perhaps applying the machine’s brake now that it was too late. The side squalled across the hood of the pickup truck, slowing the van further, but it was not done doing damage even so. Before coming to a complete stop it struck King again, this time as he lay on the ground. Roland heard the snap of a breaking bone. It was followed by the writer’s cry of pain. And now Roland knew for sure about the pain in his own hip, didn’t he? It had never been dry twist at all.
He scrambled to his feet, only peripherally aware that his pain was entirely gone. He looked at Stephen King’s unnaturally twisted body beneath the left front wheel of the blue vehicle and thought Good! with unthinking savagery. Good! If someone has to die here, let it be you! To hell with Gan’s navel, to hell with the stories that come out of it, to hell with the Tower, let it be you and not my boy!
The bumbler raced past Roland to where Jake lay on his back at the rear of the van with blue exhaust blowing into his open eyes. Oy did not hesitate; he seized the Oriza pouch that was still slung over Jake’s shoulder and used it to pull the boy away from the van, doing it inch by inch, his short strong legs digging up puffs of dust. Blood was pouring from Jake’s ears and the corners of his mouth. The heels of his shor’boots left a double line of tracks in the dirt and crisp brown pine needles.
Roland staggered to Jake and fell on his knees beside him. His first thought was that Jake was all right after all. The boy’s limbs were straight, thank all the gods, and the mark running across the bridge of his nose and down one beardless cheek was oil flecked with rust, not blood as Roland had first assumed. There was blood coming out of his ears, yes, and his mouth, too, but the latter stream might only be flowing from a cut in the lining of his cheek, or—
“Go and see to the writer,” Jake said. His voice was calm, not at all constricted by pain. They might have been sitting around a little cookfire after a day on the trail, waiting for what Eddie liked to call vittles …or, if he happened to be feeling particularly humorous (as he often was), “wittles.”
“The writer can wait,” Roland said curtly, thinking: I’ve been given a miracle. One made by the combination of a boy’s yielding, not-quite-finished body, and the soft earth that gave beneath him when that bastard’s truckomobile ran over him.
“No,” Jake said. “He can’t.” And when he moved, trying to sit up, his shirt pulled a little tighter against the top half of his body and Roland saw the dreadful concavity of the boy’s chest. More blood poured from Jake’s mouth, and when he tried to speak again he began to cough, instead. Roland’s heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.
Oy voiced a moaning cry, Jake’s name expressed in a half-howl that made Roland’s arms burst out in gooseflesh.
“Don’t try to talk,” Roland said. “Something may be sprung inside of you. A rib, mayhap two.”
Jake turned his head to the side. He spat out a mouthful of blood—some of it ran down his cheek like chewing tobacco— and took a hold on Roland’s wrist. His grip was strong; so was his voice, each word clear.
“Everything’s sprung. This is dying—I know because I’ve done it before.” What he said next was what Roland had been thinking just before they started out from Cara Laughs: “If ka will say so, let it be so. See to the man we came to save!”
It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy’s eyes and voice. It was done, now, the Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except, perhaps, for King. The man they had come to save. How much of their fate had danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers? All? Some? This?
Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he lay pinned beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King hadn’t been driving the van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be doing, he never would have been here when the fool came calling, and Jake’s chest wouldn’t have that terrible sunken look. It was too much, coming so soon after Eddie had been bushwhacked.
And yet—
“Don’t move,” he said, getting up. “Oy, don’t let him move.”
“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake’s shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses. Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was always for keeps.
Roland turned to where the writer lay.
TWO
When Bryan Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both, were barking and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out some new and utterly hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would split, not from the shock of what had just happened but from pure racket. She saw the man’s revolver lying on the ground and picked it up. The small part of her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by the weight of the thing. Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars gone, she could hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling … well, one howling whatever-it-was.
“Back your van off the guy you hit,” she said. “Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I’ll blow your jackass head off.”
Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot, bewildered eyes. “What kid?” he asked.
THREE
When the van’s front wheel rolled slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower body was twisted unnaturally to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side. His thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock against which it had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in blood. He looked worse than Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn’t kill him, he’d probably live through this. Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller body.
“You again,” King said in a low voice.
“You remember me.”
“Yes. Now.” King licked his lips. “Thirsty.”
Roland had nothing to drink, and wouldn’t have given more than enough to wet King’s lips even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting could lead to choking. “Sorry,” he said.
“No. You’re not.” He licked his lips again. “Jake?”
“Over there, on the ground. You know him?”
King tried to smile. “Wrote him. Where’s the one that was with you before? Where’s Eddie?”
“Dead,” Roland said. “In the DevarToi.”
King frowned. “Devar … ? I don’t know that.”
“No. That’s why we’re here. Why we had to come here. One of my friends is dead, another may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one lazy, fearful man stopped doing the job for which ka intended him.”
No traffic on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the chirping birds, the world was silent. They might have been frozen in time. Perhaps we are, Roland thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might be possible. Anything might be possible.
“I lost the Beam,” King said from where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold.
Roland reached under King and helped him to sit up. The writer cried out in pain as the swollen ball of his right hip grated in the shattered, compressed remains of its socket, but he did not protest. Roland pointed into the sky. Fat white fairweather clouds—los ángeles, the cowpokes of Mejis had called them—hung motionless in the blue, except for those directly above them. There they hied rapidly across the sky, as if blown by a narrow wind.
“There!” Roland whispered furiously into the writer’s scraped, dirt-clogged ear. “Directly above you! All around you! Does thee not feel it? Does thee not see it?”
“Yes,” King said. “I see it now.”
“Aye, and ’twas always there. You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away. My friend had to save you for you to see it again.”
Roland’s left hand fumbled in his belt and brought out a shell. At first his fingers wouldn’t do their old, dexterous trick; they were trembling too badly. He was only able to still them by reminding himself that the longer it took him to do this, the greater the chance that they would be interrupted, or that Jake would die while he was busy with this miserable excuse for a man.