Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

“Did he have to push again, while you were coming here? I suppose he did. I knew one more might kill him. Sai Brautigan did, too. And Dinky.”

  “But that wasn’t it, Roland. It was his foot.”

  The gunslinger looked at her, not understanding.

  “He cut it on a piece of broken glass during the fight to take Blue Heaven, and the air and dirt of that place was poison!” It was Detta who spat the last word, her accent so thick that the gunslinger barely understood it: Pizen! “Goddam foot swole up … toes like sausages … then his cheeks and throat went all dusky, like a bruise … he took fever …” She pulled in a deep breath, clutching the two blankets she wore tighter around her. “He was delirious, but his head cleared at the end. He spoke of you, and of Susan Delgado. He spoke with such love and such regret …” She paused, then burst out: “We will go there, Roland, we will, and if it isn’t worth it, your Tower, somehow we’ll make it worth it!”

  “We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll find the Dark Tower, and nothing will stand against us, and before we go in, we’ll speak their names. All of the lost.”

  “Your list will be longer than mine,” she said, “but mine will be long enough.”

  To this Roland did not reply, but the robot huckster, perhaps startled out of its long sleep by the sound of their voices, did. “Girls, girls, girls!” it cried from inside the batwing doors of the Gaiety Bar and Grill. “Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell, who cares, they give, you tell, girls tell, you tell …” There was a pause and then the robot huckster shouted one final word—“SATISFACTION!”—and fell silent.

  “By the gods, but this is a sad place,” he said. “We’ll stay the night and then see it no more.”

  “At least the sun’s out, and that’s a relief after Thunderclap, but isn’t it cold!”

  He nodded, then asked about the others.

  “They’ve gone on,” she said, “but there was a minute there when I didn’t think any of us were going anywhere except to the bottom of yonder crevasse.”

  She pointed to the end of the Fedic high street furthest from the castle wall.

  “There are TV screens that still work in some of the traincars, and as we came up on town we got a fine view of the bridge that’s gone. We could see the ends sticking out over the hole, but the gap in the middle had to be a hundred yards across. Maybe more. We could see the train trestle, too. That was still intact. The train was slowing down by then, but not enough so any of us could have jumped off. By then there was no time. And the jump would likely have killed anyone who tried. We were going, oh I’m gonna say fifty miles an hour. And as soon as we were on the trestle, the fucking thing started to creak and groan. Or to queel and grale, if you’ve ever read your James Thurber, which I suppose you have not. The train was playing music. Like Blaine did, do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we could hear the trestle getting ready to let go even over that. Then everything started shaking from side to side. A voice—very calm and soothing—said, ‘We are experiencing minor difficulties, please take your seats.’ Dinky was holding that little Russian girl, Dani. Ted took my hands and said, ‘I want to tell you, madam, that it has been a pleasure to know you.’ There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my seat—would have, if Ted hadn’t been holding onto me—and I thought ‘That’s it, we’re gone, please God let me be dead before whatever’s down there gets its teeth into me,’ and for a second or two we were going backward. Backward, Roland! I could see the whole car—we were in the first one behind the loco—tilting up. There was the sound of tearing metal. Then the good old Spirit of Topeka put on a burst of speed. Say what you want to about the old people, I know they got a lot of things wrong, but they built machines that had some balls.

  “The next thing I knew, we were coasting into the station. And here comes that same soothing voice, this time telling us to look around our seats and make sure we’ve got all our personals—our gunna, you ken. Like we were on a damn TWA flight landing at Idlewild! It wasn’t until we were out on the platform that we saw the last nine cars of the train were gone. Thank God they were all empty.” She cast a baleful (but frightened) eye toward the far end of the street. “Hope whatever’s down there chokes on em.”

  Then she brightened.

  “There’s one good thing—at speeds of up to three hundred miles an hour, which is what that ain’t-we-happy voice said the Spirit of Topeka was doing, we must have left Master Spider-Boy in the dust.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Roland said.

  She rolled her eyes wearily. “Don’t tell me that.”

  “I do tell you. But we’ll deal with Mordred when the time comes, and I don’t think that will be today.”

  “Good.”

  “Have you been beneath the Dogan again? I take it you have.”

  Susannah’s eyes grew round. “Isn’t it something? Makes Grand Central look like a train station someplace out in Sticksville, U.S.A. How long did it take you to find your way up?”

  “If it had just been me, I’d still be wandering around down there,” Roland admitted. “Oy found the way out. I assumed he was following your scent.”

  Susannah considered this. “Maybe he was. Jake’s, more likely. Did you cross a wide passage with a sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED?”

  Roland nodded, but the fading sign painted on the wall had meant little to him. He had identified the passage which the Wolves took at the beginning of their raids by the sight of two motionless gray horses far down the passage, and another of those snarling masks. He had also seen a moccasin he remembered quite well, one that had been made from a chunk of rubber. One of Ted’s or Dinky’s, he decided; Sheemie Ruiz had no doubt been buried in his.

  “So,” he said. “You got off the train—how many were you?”

  “Five, with Sheemie gone,” she said. “Me, Ted, Dinky, Dani Rostov, and Fred Worthington — do you remember Fred?”

  Roland nodded. The man in the bankerly suit.

  “I gave them the guided tour of the Dogan,” she said. “As much as I could, anyway. The beds where they stole the brains out of the kids and the one where Mia finally gave birth to her monster; the one-way door between Fedic and the Dixie Pig in New York that still works; Nigel’s apartment.

  “Ted and his friends were pretty amazed by the rotunda where all the doors are, especially the one going to Dallas in 1963, where President Kennedy was killed. We found another door two levels down—this is where most of the passages are— that goes to Ford’s Theater, where President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. There’s even a poster for the play he was watching when Booth shot him. Our American Cousin, it was called. What kind of people would want to go and watch things like that?”

  Roland thought a lot of people might, actually, but knew better than to say so.

  “It’s all very old,” she said. “And very hot. And very fucking scary, if you want to know the truth. Most of the machinery has quit, and there are puddles of water and oil and God knows what everywhere. Some of the puddles gave off a glow, and Dinky said he thought it might be radiation. I don’t like to think what I got growin on my bones or when my hair’ll start fallin out. There were doors where we could hear those awful chimes … the ones that set your teeth on edge.”

  “Todash chimes.”

  “Yep. And things behind some of em. Slithery things. Was it you or was it Mia who told me there are monsters in the todash darkness?”

  “I might have,” he said. Gods knew there were.

  “There are things in that crack beyond town, too. Was Mia told me that. ‘Monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape,’ she said. And then Ted, Dinky, Dani, and Fred joined hands. They made what Ted called ‘the little good-mind.’ I could feel it even though I wasn’t in their circle, and I was glad to feel it, because that’s one spooky old place down there.” She clutched her blankets more tightly. “I don’t look forward to going a
gain.”

  “But you believe we have to.”

  “There’s a passage that goes deep under the castle and comes out on the other side, in the Discordia. Ted and his friends located it by picking up old thoughts, what Ted called ghost-thoughts. Fred had a piece of chalk in his pocket and he marked it for me, but it’ll still be hard to find again. What it’s like down there is the labyrinth in an old Greek story where this bull-monster was supposed to run. I guess we can find it again …”

  Roland bent and stroked Oy’s rough fur. “We’ll find it. This fella will backtrail your scent. Won’t you, Oy?”

  Oy looked up at him with his gold-ringed eyes but said nothing.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “Ted and the others touched the minds of the things that live in that crack outside of town. They didn’t mean to, but they did. Those things are neither for the Crimson King nor against him, they’re only for themselves, but they think. And they’re telepathic. They knew we were there, and once the contact was made, they were glad to palaver. Ted and his friends said that they’ve been tunneling their way toward the catacombs under the Experimental Station for a long long time, and now they’re close to breaking through. Once they do, they’ll be free to roam wherever they want.”

  Roland considered this silently for a few moments, rocking back and forth on the eroded heels of his boots. He hoped he and Susannah would be long gone before that breakthrough happened … but perhaps it would happen before Mordred got here, and the halfling would have to face them, if he wanted to follow. Baby Mordred against the ancient monsters from under the earth—that was a happy thought.

  At last he nodded for Susannah to go on.

  “We heard todash chimes coming from some of the passages, too. Not just from behind the doors but from passages with no doors to block em off! Do you see what that means?”

  Roland did. If they picked the wrong one—or if Ted and his friends were wrong about the passageway they had marked— he, Susannah, and Oy would likely disappear forever instead of coming out on the far side of Castle Discordia.

  “They wouldn’t leave me down there—they took me back as far as the infirmary before going on themselves—and I was damned glad. I wasn’t looking forward to finding my way alone, although I guess I probably could’ve.”

  Roland put an arm around her and gave her a hug. “And their plan was to use the door that the Wolves used?”

  “Uh-huh, the one at the end of the ORANGE PASS corridor. They’ll come out where the Wolves did, find their way to the River Whye, and then across it to Calla Bryn Sturgis. The Calla-folken will take them in, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And once they hear the whole story, they won’t…won’t lynch them or anything?”

  “I’m sure not. Henchick will know they’re telling the truth and stand up for them, even if no one else will.”

  “They’re hoping to use the Doorway Cave to get back America-side.” She sighed. “I hope it works for them, but I have my doubts.”

  Roland did, as well. But the four of them were powerful, and Ted had struck him as a man of extraordinary determination and resource. The Manni-folk were also powerful, in their way, and great travelers between the worlds. He thought that, sooner or later, Ted and his friends probably would get back to America. He considered telling Susannah that it would happen if ka willed it, then thought better of it. Ka was not her favorite word just now, and he could hardly blame her for that.

  “Now hear me very well and think hard, Susannah. Does the word Dandelo mean anything to you?”

  Oy looked up, eyes bright.

  She thought about it. “It might have some faint ring,” she said, “but I can’t do better than that. Why?”

  Roland told her what he believed: that as Eddie lay dying, he had been granted some sort of vision about a thing …or a place … or a person. Something named Dandelo. Eddie had passed this on to Jake, Jake had passed it to Oy, and Oy had passed it on to Roland.

  Susannah was frowning doubtfully. “It’s maybe been handed around too much. There was this game we used to play when we were kids. Whisper, it was called. The first kid would think something up, a word or a phrase, and whisper it to the next kid. You could only hear it once, no repeats allowed. The next kid would pass on what he thought he’d heard, and the next, and the next. By the time it got to the last kid in line, it was something entirely different, and everyone would have a good laugh. But if this is wrong, I don’t think we’ll be laughing.”

  “Well,” Roland said, “we’ll keep a lookout and hope that I got it right. Mayhap it means nothing at all.” But he didn’t really believe that.

  “What are we going to do for clothes, if it gets colder than this?” she asked.

  “We’ll make what we need. I know how. It’s something else we don’t need to worry about today. What we do need to worry about is finding something to eat. I suppose if we have to, we can find Nigel’s pantry—”

  “I don’t want to go back under the Dogan until we have to,” Susannah said. “There’s got to be a kitchen near the infirmary; they must have fed those poor kids something.”

  Roland considered this, then nodded. It was a good idea.

  “Let’s do it now,” she said. “I don’t even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark.”

  FOUR

  On Turtleback Lane, in the year of ’02, month of August, Stephen King awakes from a waking dream of Fedic. He types “I don’t even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark.” The words appear on the screen before him. It’s the end of what he calls a subchapter, but that doesn’t always mean he’s done for the day. Being done for the day depends on what he hears. Or, more properly, on what he doesn’t. What he listens for is Ves’-Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle. This time the music, which is faint on some days and so loud on others that it almost deafens him, seems to have ceased. It will return tomorrow. At least, it always has.

  He pushes the control-key and the S-key together. The computer gives a little chime, indicating that the material he’s written today has been saved. Then he gets up, wincing at the pain in his hip, and walks to the window of his office. It looks out on the driveway slanting up at a steep angle to the road where he now rarely walks. (And on the main road, Route 7, never.) The hip is very bad this morning, and the big muscles of his thigh are on fire. He rubs the hip absently as he stands looking out.

  Roland, you bastard, you gave me back the pain, he thinks. It runs down his right leg like a red-hot rope, can ya not say Gawd, can ya not say Gawd-bomb, and he’s the one who got stuck with it in the end. It’s been three years since the accident that almost took his life and the pain is still there. It’s less now, the human body has an amazing engine of healing inside it (a hot-enj, he thinks, and smiles), but sometimes it’s still bad. He doesn’t think about it much when he’s writing, writing’s a sort of benign todash, but it’s always stiff after he’s spent a couple of hours at his desk.

  He thinks of Jake. He’s sorry as hell that Jake died, and he guesses that when this last book is published, the readers are going to be just wild. And why not? Some of them have known Jake Chambers for twenty years, almost twice as long as the boy actually lived. Oh, they’ll be wild, all right, and when he writes back and says he’s as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He thinks of Misery—Annie Wilkes calling Paul Sheldon a cockadoodie brat for trying to get rid of silly, bubbleheaded Misery Chastain. Annie shouting that Paul was the writer and the writer is God to his characters, he doesn’t have to kill any of them if he doesn’t want to.

  But he’s not God. At least not in this case. He knows damned well that Jake Chambers wasn’t there on the day of his accident, nor Roland Deschain, either—the idea’s laughable, they’re make-believe, for Christ’s sake—but he also knows that at some point the song he hears when he sits at his fancy Macintosh writing-machine became Jake’s death-song, and to ignore
that would have been to lose touch with Ves’-Ka Gan entirely, and he must not do that. Not if he is to finish. That song is the only thread he has, the trail of breadcrumbs he must follow if he is ever to emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted, and—

  Are you sure you planted it?

  Well … no. In fact he is not. So call for the men in the white coats.

  And are you completely sure Jake wasn’t there that day? After all, how much of the damned accident do you actually remember?

  Not much. He remembers seeing the top of Bryan Smith’s van appear over the horizon, and realizing it’s not on the road, where it should be, but on the soft shoulder. After that he remembers Smith sitting on a rock wall, looking down at him, and telling him that his leg was broke in at least six places, maybe seven. But between these two memories—the one of the approach and the one of the immediate aftermath—the film of his memory has been burned red.

  Or almost red.

  But sometimes in the night, when he awakes from dreams he can’t quite remember …

  Sometimes there are … well …

  “Sometimes there are voices,” he says. “Why don’t you just say it?”

  And then, laughing: “I guess I just did.”

  He hears the approaching click of toenails down the hall, and Marlowe pokes his long nose into the office. He’s a Welsh Corgi, with short legs and big ears, and a pretty old guy now, with his own aches and pains, not to mention the eye he lost to cancer the previous year. The vet said he probably wouldn’t make it back from that one, but he did. What a good guy. What a tough guy. And when he raises his head from his necessarily low perspective to look at the writer, he’s wearing his old fiendish grin. How’s it goin, bubba? that look seems to say. Gettin any good words today? How do ya?

  “I do fine,” he tells Marlowe. “Hangin in. How are you doin?”

  Marlowe (sometimes known as The Snoutmaster) waggles his arthritic rear end in response.

  “You again.” That’s what I said to him. And he asked, “Do you remember me?” Or maybe he said it—“You remember me.” I told him I was thirsty. He said he didn’t have anything to drink, he said sorry, and I called him a liar. And I was right to call him a liar because he wasn’t sorry a bit. He didn’t care a row of pins if I was thirsty because Jake was dead and he tried to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me—