by Stephen King
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Anyway, we know for sure that she’s out and for pretty sure she didn’t leave anyone behind to watch her gunna. But, just in case…” He patted the front of his shirt, which now concealed the Ruger.
As they crossed the lobby to the elevator bank, Callahan said: “What do we want in her room?”
“I don’t know.”
Callahan touched him on the shoulder. “I think you do.”
The doors of the middle elevator popped open and Jake got on with Oy still at heel. Callahan followed, but Jake thought he was all at once dragging his feet a little.
“Maybe,” Jake said as they started up. “And maybe you do, too.”
Callahan’s stomach suddenly felt heavier, as if he’d just finished a large meal. He supposed the added weight was fear. “I thought I was rid of it,” he said. “When Roland took it out of the church, I really thought I was rid of it.”
“Some bad pennies just keep turning up,” Jake said.
Eight
He was prepared to try his unique red key in every door on the nineteenth floor if he had to, but Jake knew 1919 was right even before they reached it. Callahan did, too, and a sheen of sweat broke on his forehead. It felt thin and hot. Feverish.
Even Oy knew. The bumbler whined uneasily.
“Jake,” Callahan said. “We need to think this over. That thing is dangerous. Worse, it’smalevolent. ”
“That’s why we gotta take it,” Jake said patiently. He stood in front of 1919, drumming the MagCard between his fingers. From behind the door—and under it, and through it—came a hideous drone like the singing voice of some apocalyptic idiot. Mixed in was the sound of jangling, out-of-tune chimes. Jake knew the ball had the power to send you todash, and in those dark and mostly doorless spaces, it was all too possible to become lost forever. Even if you found your way to another version of Earth, it would have a queer darkness to it, as if the sun were always on the verge of total eclipse.
“Have you seen it?” Callahan asked.
Jake shook his head.
“I have,” Callahan said dully, and armed sweat from his forehead. His cheeks had gone leaden. “There’s an Eye in it. I think it’s the Crimson King’s eye. I think it’s a part of him that’s trapped in there forever, and insane. Jake, taking that ball to a place where there are vampires and low men—servants of the King—would be like giving Adolf Hitler an A-bomb for his birthday.”
Jake knew perfectly well that Black Thirteen was capable of doing great, perhaps illimitable, damage. But he knew something else, as well.
“Pere, if Mia left Black Thirteen in this room and she’s now going to wherethey are, they’ll know about it soon enough. And they’ll be after it in one of their big flashy cars before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“Can’t we leave it for Roland?” Callahan asked miserably.
“Yes,” Jake said. “That’s a good idea, just like taking it to the Dixie Pig is a bad one. But we can’t leave it for himhere. ” Then, before Callahan could say anything else, Jake slid the blood-red MagCard into the slot above the doorknob. There was a loud click and the door swung open.
“Oy, stay right here, outside the door.”
“Ake!” He sat down, curling his cartoon squiggle of a tail around his paws, and looked at Jake with anxious eyes.
Before they went in, Jake laid a cold hand on Callahan’s wrist and said a terrible thing.
“Guard your mind.”
Nine
Mia had left the lights on, and yet a queer darkness had crept into Room 1919 since her departure. Jake recognized it for what it was: todash darkness. The droning song of the idiot and the muffled, jangling chimes were coming from the closet.
It’s awake,he thought with mounting dismay.It was asleep before—dozing, at least—but all this moving around woke it up. What do I do? Are the box and the bowling bag enough to make it safe? Do I have anything that will make it safer? Any charm, any sigul?
As Jake opened the closet door, Callahan found himself exerting all the force of his will—which was considerable—just to keep from fleeing. That atonal humming and the occasional jangling chimes beneath it offended his ears and mind and heart. He kept remembering the way station, and how he had shrieked when the hooded man had opened the box. Howslick the thing inside had been! It had been lying on red velvet…and it hadrolled. Hadlooked at him, and all the malevolent madness of the universe had been in that dis-embodied, leering gaze.
I will not run. Iwill not.If the boy can stay, I can stay.
Ah, but the boy was agunslinger, and that made a difference. He was more than ka’s child; he was Roland of Gilead’s child as well, his adopted son.
Don’t you see how pale he is? He’s as scared as you are, for Christ’s sake! Now get hold of yourself, man!
Perhaps it was perverse, but observing Jake’s extreme pallor steadied him. When an old bit of nonsense song occurred to him and he began to sing under his breath, he steadied yet more.
“Round and round the mulberry bush,” he sang in a whisper, “the monkey chased the weasel…the monkey thought ’twas all in fun…”
Jake eased open the closet. There was a room safe inside. He tried 1919 and nothing happened. He paused to let the safe mechanism reset itself, wiped sweat from his forehead with both hands (they were shaking), and tried again. This time he punched 1999, and the safe swung open.
Black Thirteen’s droning song and the contrapuntal jangle of the todash chimes both increased. The sounds were like chilly fingers prying around in their heads.
And it can send you places,Callahan thought.All you have to do is let down your guard a little bit…open the bag…open the box…and then…oh, the places you’ll go! Pop goes the weasel!
True though he knew this to be, part of himwanted to open the box.Lusted to. Nor was he the only one; as he watched, Jake knelt before the safe like a worshipper at an altar. Callahan reached to stop him from lifting the bag out with an arm that seemed incredibly heavy.
It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t,a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Callahan kept reaching. He grasped Jake’s collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.
“No,” he said. “Don’t.” His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Jake to one side, the boy seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Callahan fell onto his own knees before the open safe (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice of Black Thirteen, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill the boy, to open the boy’s throat and give the ball a refreshing drink of his warm life’s blood. Then Callahan himself would be allowed to leap from the room’s window.
All the way down to Forty-sixth Street you will praise me,Black Thirteen assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.
“Do it,” Jake sighed. “Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn.”
“Ake!” Oy barked from the doorway.“Ake!” They both ignored him.
As Callahan reached for the bag, he found himself remembering his final encounter with Barlow, the king vampire—the Type One, in Callahan’s own parlance—who had come to the little town of ’Salem’s Lot. Found himself remembering how he’d confronted Barlow in Mark Petrie’s house, with Mark’s parents lying lifeless on the floor at the vampire’s feet, their skulls crushed and their oh-so-rational brains turned to jelly.
While you fall, I’ll let you whisper the name ofmyking, Black Thirteen whispered.The Crimson King.
As Callahan watched his hands grasp the bag—whatever had been there before, NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES was now printed on the side—he thought of how his crucifix had first glared with some otherworldly light, driving Barlow back…and then had begun to darken again.
“Open it!” Jake said eagerly. “Open it, I want to se
e it!”
Oy was barking steadily now. Down the hall someone yelled “Shut that dog up!” and was likewise ignored.
Callahan slipped the ghostwood box from the bag—the box that had spent such a blessedly quiet time hidden beneath the pulpit of his church in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Now he would open it. Now he would observe Black Thirteen in all its repellent glory.
And then die. Gratefully.
Ten
Sad to see a man’s faith fail,the vampire Kurt Barlow had said, and then he’d plucked Don Callahan’s dark and useless cross from his hand. Why had he been able to do that? Because—behold the paradox, consider the riddle—Father Callahanhad failed to throw the cross away himself. Because he had failed to accept that the cross was nothing but one symbol of a far greater power, one that ran like a river beneath the universe, perhaps beneath a thousand universes—
I need no symbol,Callahan thought; and then:Is that why God let me live? Was He giving me a second chance to learn that?
It was possible, he thought as his hands settled on the lid of the box. Second chances were one of God’s specialties.
“Folks, you got to shut your dogup. ” The querulous voice of a hotel maid, but very distant. Then it said: “Madre de Dios,why’s it sodark in here? What’s that…what’s that…n…n…”
Perhaps she was trying to saynoise. If so, she never finished. Even Oy now seemed resigned to the spell of the humming, singing ball, for he gave up his protests (and his post at the door) to come trotting into the room. Callahan supposed the beast wanted to be at Jake’s side when the end came.
The Pere struggled to still his suicidal hands. The thing in the box raised the volume of its idiot’s song, and the tips of his fingers twitched in response. Then they stilled again.I have that much of a victory, Callahan thought.
“Ne’mine,I’ll do it.” The voice of the maid, drugged and avid. “I want to see it.Dios! I want tohold it!”
Jake’s arms seemed to weigh a ton, but he forced them to reach out and grab the maid, a middle-aged Hispanic lady who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds.
As he had struggled to still his hands, so Callahan now struggled to pray.
God, not my will but Thine. Not the potter but the potter’s clay. If I can’t do anything else, help me to take it in my arms and jump out the window and destroy the gods-damned thing once and for all. But if it be Your will to help me make it still, instead—to make it go back to sleep—then send me Your strength. And help me to remember…
Drugged by Black Thirteen he might have been, but Jake still hadn’t lost his touch. Now he plucked the rest of the thought out of the Pere’s mind and spoke it aloud, only changing the word Callahan used to the one Roland had taught them.
“I need no sigul,” Jake said. “Not the potter but the potter’s clay,and I need no sigul! ”
“God,” Callahan said. The word was as heavy as a stone, but once it was out of his mouth, the rest of them came easier. “God, if You’re still there, if You still hear me, this is Callahan. Please still this thing, Lord. Please send it back to sleep. I ask it in the name of Jesus.”
“In the name of the White,” Jake said.
“Ite!”Oy yapped.
“Amen,” said the maid in a stoned, bemused voice.
For a moment the droning idiot’s song from the box rose another notch, and Callahan understood it was hopeless, that not even God Almighty could stand against Black Thirteen.
Then it fell silent.
“God be thanked,” he whispered, and realized his entire body was drenched with sweat.
Jake burst into tears and picked up Oy. The chambermaid also began to weep, but had no one to comfort her. As Pere Callahan slid the meshy (and oddly heavy) material of the bowling bag back around the ghostwood box, Jake turned to her and said, “You need to take a nap, sai.”
It was the only thing he could think of, and it worked. The maid turned and walked across to the bed. She crawled up on it, pulled her skirt down over her knees, and appeared to fall unconscious.
“Will it stay asleep?” Jake asked Callahan in a low voice. “Because…Pere…that was too close for comfort.”
Perhaps, but Callahan’s mind suddenly seemed free—freer than it had been in years. Or perhaps it was his heart that had been freed. In any case, his thoughts seemed very clear as he lowered the bowling bag to the folded dry-cleaning bags on top of the safe.
Remembering a conversation in the alley behind Home. He and Frankie Chase and Magruder, out on a smoke-break. The talk had turned to protecting your valuables in New York, especially if you had to go away for awhile, and Magruder had said the safest storage in New York…the absolute safest storage…
“Jake, there’s also a bag of plates in the safe.”
“Orizas?”
“Yes. Get them.” While he did, Callahan went to the maid on the bed and reached into the left skirt pocket of her uniform. He brought out a number of plastic MagCards, a few regular keys, and a brand of mints he’d never heard of—Altoids.
He turned her over. It was like turning a corpse.
“What’re you doing?” Jake whispered. He had put Oy down so he could sling the silk-lined reed pouch over his shoulder. It was heavy, but he found the weight comforting.
“Robbing her, what does it look like?” the Pere replied angrily. “Father Callahan of the Holy Roman Catholic Church is robbing a hotel maid. Or would, if she had any…ah!”
In the other pocket was the little roll of bills he’d been hoping for. She had been performing turndown service when Oy’s barking had distracted her. This included flushing the john, pulling the shades, turning down the bed, and leaving what the maids called “pillow candy.” Sometimes patrons tipped for the service. This maid was carrying two tens, three fives, and four ones.
“I’ll pay you back if our paths cross,” Callahan told the unconscious maid. “Otherwise, just consider it your service to God.”
“Whiiiite,”the maid said in the slurred whisper of one who talks and yet sleeps.
Callahan and Jake exchanged a look.
Eleven
In the elevator going back down, Callahan held the bag containing Black Thirteen and Jake carried the one with the ’Rizas inside. He also carried their money. It now came to a total of forty-eight dollars.
“Will it be enough?” It was his only question after hearing the Pere’s plan for disposing of the ball, a plan which would necessitate another stop.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Callahan replied. They were speaking in the low voices of conspirators, although the elevator was empty save for them. “If I can rob a sleeping chambermaid, stiffing a cab driver should be a leadpipe cinch.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. He was thinking that Roland had done more than rob a few innocent people during his quest for the Tower; he’d killed a good many, as well. “Let’s just get this done and then find the Dixie Pig.”
“You don’t have to worry so much, you know,” Callahan said. “If the Tower falls, you’ll be among the very first to know.”
Jake studied him. After a moment or two of this, Callahan cracked a smile. He couldn’t help it.
“Not that funny, sai,” Jake said, and they went out into the dark of that early summer’s night in the year of ’99.
Twelve
It was quarter to nine and there was still a residue of light across the Hudson when they arrived at the first of their two stops. The taximeter’s tale was nine dollars and fifty cents. Callahan gave the cabbie one of the maid’s tens.
“Mon, don’t hurt yose’f,” the driver said in a powerful Jamaican accent. “I dreadful ’fraid you might leave yose’fshote. ”
“You’re lucky to get anything at all, son,” Callahan said kindly. “We’re seeing New York on a budget.”
“My woman got a budget, too,” said the cabbie, and then drove away.
Jake, meanwhile, was looking up. “Wow,” he said softly. “I guess I forgot howbig all this is.”
Callahan followed his glance, then said: “Let’s get it done.” And, as they hurried inside: “What are you getting from Susannah? Anything?”
“Man with a guitar,” Jake said. “Singing…I don’t know. And I should. It was another one of those coincidences that aren’t coincidences, like the owner of the bookstore being named Tower or Balazar’s joint turning out to be The Leaning Tower. Some song…I should know.”
“Anything else?”
Jake shook his head. “That’s the last thing I got from her, and it was just after we got into the taxi outside the hotel. I think she’s gone into the Dixie Pig and now she’s out of touch.” He smiled faintly at the unintentional pun.
Callahan veered toward the building directory in the center of the huge lobby. “Keep Oy close to you.”
“Don’t worry.”
It didn’t take Callahan long to find what he was looking for.
Thirteen
The sign read:
LONG-TERM STORAGE
10—36 MOS.
USE TOKENS
TAKE KEY
MANAGEMENT ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY
FOR LOST PROPERTY!
Below, in a framed box, was a list of rules and regulations, which they both scanned closely. From beneath their feet came the rumble of a subway train. Callahan, who hadn’t been in New York for almost twenty years, had no idea what train it might be, where it might go, or how deep in the city’s intestine it might run. They’d already come down two levels by escalator, first to the shops and then to here. The subway station was deeper still.
Jake shifted the bag of Orizas to his other shoulder and pointed out the last line on the framed notice. “We’d get a discount if we were tenants,” he said.
“Count!” Oy cried sternly.
“Aye, laddie,” Callahan agreed, “and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. We don’t need a discount.”
Nor did they. After walking through a metal detector (no problem with the Orizas) and past a rent-a-cop dozing on a stool, Jake determined that one of the smallest lockers—those on the far lefthand side of the long room—would accommodate the MID-WORLD LANES bag and the box inside. To rent the box for the maximum length of time would cost twenty-seven dollars. Pere Callahan fed bills into the various slots of the token-dispensing machine carefully, prepared for a malfunction: of all the wonders and horrors he’d seen during their brief time back in the city (the latter including a two-dollar taxi drop-charge), this was in some ways the hardest to accept. A vending machine that accepted paper currency? A lot of sophisticated technology had to lie behind this machine with its dull brown finish and its sign commanding patrons to INSERT BILLS FACE UP! The picture accompanying the command showed George Washington with the top of his head facing to the left, but the bills Callahan fed into the machine seemed to work no matter which way the head was facing. Just as long as the picture was on top. Callahan was almost relieved when the machinedid malfunction once, refusing to accept an old and wrinkled dollar bill. The relatively crisp fives it gobbled up without a murmur, dispensing little showers of tokens into the tray beneath. Callahan gathered up twenty-seven dollars’ worth of these, started back toward where Jake was waiting, and then turned around again, curious about something. He looked on the side of the amazing (amazing to him, at least, it was) currency-eating vending machine. Toward the bottom, on a series of little plaques, was the information he’d been looking for. This was a Change-Mak-R 2000, manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, but a lot of companies had chipped in: General Electric, DeWalt Electronics, Showrie Electric, Panasonic, and, at the bottom, smallest of all but very much there, North Central Positronics.