Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  “Thank God,” he says. “Your name is Susannah?”

  “Yes,” she says. “My name is Susannah.”

  Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least. She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good. Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those things because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it’s true. Her memories of

  (Mid-World)

  the gunslinger’s where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know it’s all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this.

  But at the same time, it’s good.

  It’s a damn miracle, is what it is.

  “Are you cold?” he asks.

  “No, I’m okay. Why?”

  “You shivered.”

  “It’s the sweetness of the cream.” Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-dusted foam.

  “If you aren’t cold now, you will be,” he says. “WRKO says the temperature’s gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something.” From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red: MERRY CHRISTMAS.

  “Bought it in Brendio’s, on Fifth Avenue,” he says.

  Susannah has never heard of Brendio’s. Brentano’s, maybe—the bookstore—but not Brendio’s. But of course in the America where she grew up, she never heard of Nozz-A-La or Takuro Spirit automobiles, either. “Did your voices tell you to buy it?” Teasing him a little now.

  He blushes. “Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on.”

  It’s a perfect fit.

  “Tell me something,” she says. “Who’s the President? You’re not going to tell me it’s Ronald Reagan, are you?”

  He looks at her incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. “What? That old actor who used to host Death Valley Days on TV? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope. I always thought you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s okay, just tell me who the President is.”

  “Gary Hart,” he says, as if speaking to a child. “From Colorado. He almost dropped out of the race in 1980—as I’m sure you know—over that Monkey Business business. Then he said ‘Fuck em if they can’t take a joke’ and hung on in there. Ended up winning in a landslide.”

  His smile fades a little as he studies her.

  “You’re not kidding me, are you?”

  “Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning?”

  Eddie looks almost shocked. “How can you know that?”

  “It’s a long story. Maybe someday I’ll tell you.” If I can still remember, she thinks.

  “It’s not just the voices.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’ve been dreaming of you. For months now. I’ve been waiting for you. Listen, we don’t know each other … this is crazy … but do you have a place to stay? You don’t, do you?”

  She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it’s Blaine the train she’s imitating), she says: “Ah’m a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim.”

  Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn’t know how it can be, but yes, it’s going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.

  “If I asked how I know you … or where you come from …” He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. “Or how I can possibly love you already … ?”

  She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts the side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe—she can’t quite remember) is gone. “Sugar,” she tells him, “it’s what I said: a long story. You’ll get some of it in time, though … what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation.” She looks around and then says, “What year is this?”

  “1987,” he says.

  “And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?”

  The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him here—with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket—bursts out laughing. “God, no! I’m from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He’s right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears.”

  The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks.

  “Let me introduce you,” he says.

  “No, really, I—”

  “Hey, if we’re gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We’re tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!”

  She hasn’t noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears’ environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.

  “Jake’s been dreaming about you, too,” Eddie tells her. “It’s the only reason I know I’m not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least.”

  She takes Eddie’s hand—that familiar, well-loved hand. And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions—so will they—but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.

  “You and Jake—what’s your last name?”

  “Toren,” he says. “It’s German.”

  Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.

  And they did live.

  Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live.

  That’s all.

  That’s enough.

  Say thankya.

  FOUND

  (CODA)

  ONE

  I’ve told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was (I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless). I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-World. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God’s way of telling us we’ve finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say that is what you paid your money for, the show you came to see.

  I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the
pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man (or Manni) can open. I’ve written many, but most only for the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroom—because it is the custom of the country.

  And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last memory be of seeing Eddie, Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again for the first time, listening to the children’s choir sing “What Child Is This.” You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later Oy (probably a canine version with a long neck, odd gold-ringed eyes, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. That’s a pretty picture, isn’t it? I think so. And pretty close to happily ever after, too. Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say.

  Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked . What’s behind it won’t improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.”

  Endings are heartless.

  Ending is just another word for goodbye.

  TWO

  Would you still?

  Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is the Dark Tower, at the end of End-World. See it, I beg.

  See it very well.

  Here is the Dark Tower at sunset.

  THREE

  He came to it with the oddest feeling of remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie called déjà vu.

  The roses of Can’-Ka No Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow suns deep in their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that gray-black column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he had always known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he had always promised himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with perfect force, for no longer was there any need to reserve energy with which to fight the Tower’s pull. To give in—finally—was the greatest relief of his life.

  He called the names of his compadres and amoras, and although each came from deeper in his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of him. His voice rolled away to the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He called Eddie’s and Susannah’s. He called Jake’s, and last of all he called his own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it. That horn was the voice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast.

  In my dreams the horn was always mine, he thought. I should have known better, for mine was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill.

  A voice whispered from above him: It would have been the work of three seconds to bend and pick it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Roland—it always comes back to that.

  That was, he thought, the voice of the Beam—the one they had saved. If it spoke out of gratitude it could have saved its breath, for what good were such words to him now? He remembered a line from Browning’s poem: One taste of the old times sets all to rights.

  Such had never been his experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They were the food of poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat.

  Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the Tower’s base, letting the voice of the roses—that welcoming horn—echo away to nothing. The feeling of déjà vu was still strong, almost as though he had been here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams. He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson King had stood, trying to defy ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons that held the few remaining sneetches (the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it seemed), he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking down at him with eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the optic nerves (now tinted red-orange with the light of the leaving sun) trailed away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed the Crimson King’s eyes would remain up there forever, watching Can’-Ka No Rey while their owner wandered the world to which Patrick’s eraser and enchanted Artist’s eye had sent him. Or, more likely, to the space between the worlds.

  Roland walked on to where the path ended at the steel-banded slab of black ghostwood. Upon it, a sigul that he now knew well was engraved three-quarters of the way up:

  Here he laid two things, the last of his gunna: Aunt Talitha’s cross, and his remaining sixgun. When he stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away:

  UNFOUND had become FOUND.

  He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voice—Welcome, Roland, thee of Eld. It was the Tower’s voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself, likely, and the pulse he’d felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had always been Gan’s beating life-force.

  Commala, gunslinger. Commala-come-come.

  And wafting out came the smell of alkali, bitter as tears. The smell of … what? What, exactly? Before he could place it the odor was gone, leaving Roland to surmise he had imagined it.

  He stepped inside and the Song of the Tower, which he had always heard—even in Gilead, where it had hidden in his mother’s voice as she sang him her cradle songs—finally ceased. There was another sigh. The door swung shut with a boom, but he was not left in blackness. The light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the glow of sunset.

  Stone stairs, a passage just wide enough for one person, ascended.

  “Now comes Roland,” he called, and the words seemed to spiral up into infinity. “Thee at the top, hear and make me welcome if you would. If you’re my enemy, know that I come unarmed and mean no ill.”

  He began to climb.

  Nineteen steps brought him to the first landing (and to each one thereafter). A door stood open here and beyond it was a small round room. The stones of its wall were carved with thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was the face of Calvin Tower, peeping slyly over the top of an open book). The faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring.

  Welcome Roland, you of the many miles and many worlds; welcome thee of Gilead, thee of Eld.

  On the far side of the room was a door flanked by dark red swags traced with gold. About six feet up from the door—at the exact height of his eyes—was a small round window, little bigger than an outlaw’s peekhole. There was a sweet smell, and this one he could identify: the bag of pine sachet his mother had placed first in his cradle, then, later, in his first real bed. It brought back those days with great clarity, as aromas always do; if any sense serves us as a time machine, it’s that of smell.

  Then, like the bitter call of the alkali, it was gone.

  The room was unfurnished, but a single item lay on the floor. He advanced to it and picked it up. It was a small cedar clip, its bow wrapped in a bit of blue silk ribbon. He had seen such things long ago, in Gilead; must once have worn one himself. When the sawbones cut a newly arrived baby’s umbilical cord, separating mother from child, such a clip was put on above the baby’s navel, where it would stay until the remainder of the cord fell off, and the clip with it. (The navel itself was called tet-ka can Gan.) The bit of silk on this one told that it had belonged to a boy. A girl’s clip would have been wrapped with pink ribbon.

  ’Twas my own, he thought. He regarded it a moment longer, fascinated, then put it carefully back where it had been. Where it belonged. When he stood up again, he saw a baby’s face

  (Can this be my darling bah-bo? If you say so, let it be so!)

  among
the multitude of others. It was contorted, as if its first breath of air outside the womb had not been to its liking, already fouled with death. Soon it would pronounce judgment on its new situation with a squall that would echo throughout the apartments of Steven and Gabrielle, causing those friends and servants who heard it to smile with relief. (Only Marten Broadcloak would scowl.) The birthing was done, and it had been a livebirth, tell Gan and all the gods thankya. There was an heir to the Line of Eld, and thus there was still the barest outside chance that the world’s rueful shuffle toward ruin might be reversed.

  Roland left that room, his sense of déjà vu stronger than ever. So was the sense that he had entered the body of Gan himself.

  He turned to the stairs and once more began to climb.

  FOUR

  Another nineteen steps took him to the second landing and the second room. Here bits of cloth were scattered across the circular floor. Roland had no question that they had once been an infant’s clout, torn to shreds by a certain petulant interloper, who had then gone out onto the balcony for a look back at the field of roses and found himself betaken. He was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom … but in the end he had slipped, and now he would pay forever and ever.

  If it was only a look he wanted, why did he bring his ammunition with him when he stepped out?

  Because it was his only gunna, and slung over his back, whispered one of the faces carved into the curve of the wall. This was the face of Mordred. Roland saw no hatefulness there now but only the lonely sadness of an abandoned child. That face was as lonesome as a train-whistle on a moonless night. There had been no clip for Mordred’s navel when he came into the world, only the mother he had taken for his first meal. No clip, never in life, for Mordred had never been part of Gan’s tet. No, not he.

  My Red Father would never go unarmed, whispered the stone boy. Not once he was away from his castle. He was mad, but never that mad.

  In this room was the smell of talc put on by his mother while he lay naked on a towel, fresh from his bath and playing with his newly discovered toes. She had soothed his skin with it, singing as she caressed him: Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here!