by Stephen King
In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose.
It hadn’t been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in 1977, when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled with trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced the coming of Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate Associates. This building, all one hundred stories of it, had been built instead, and around the rose. Whatever business might be done here was secondary to that purpose.
2 Hammarskjöld Plaza was a shrine.
Six
There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he drew glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself. Not for years—perhaps since his early teenage years—had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-tapping distance of him without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he surely should have—
The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had approached him was clearly surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back from the ceiling above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman’s green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in them, but still, first to be surprised, then to miss like that—
He glanced down at the woman’s feet and got at least part of the answer. She was wearing a kind of shoe he’d never seen before, something with deep foam soles and what might have been canvas uppers. Shoes that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface. As for the woman herself—
A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that he had “seen the boat she came in,” as familial resemblance was sometimes expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis; second, that a society of gunslingers was a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone World, and he had just been accosted by one of them.
And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?
“I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,” Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”
The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him…although I can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain. There’s a person who wants…” For a moment she looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “…a person who wants to palaver with you,” she finished.
“All right,” he said.
She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”
Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”
“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.” And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor—not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.
At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faintly familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ there, and easily. When he had finished, it changed back again.
“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”
She smiled—her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff—and nodded. “Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”
“Say true?”
“True.”
The lobby had regained its normal rhythm…except, Roland understood, the rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned the nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to. They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it…which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called ele-vaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfectly straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old. And it didn’t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.
“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”
“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”
Seven
The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone. He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States. It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”
“Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her. “Surely not, you’re too young. His granddaughter?”
Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain. I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who mostly raised me.”
“Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.
“As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning. “Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A little frightened, but pleased.”
Roland shook her hand, but the gesture was perfunctory, hardly more than a touch. Then, with considerably more feeling (for this was the ritual he had grown up with, the one he understood), he placed his fist against his forehead and made a leg. “Long days and pleasant nights, Nancy Deepneau.”
Her smile widened into a cheerful grin. “And may you have twice the number, Roland of Gilead! May you have twice the number.”
The ele-vaydor came, they got on, and it was to the ninety-ninth floor that they went.
Eight
The doors opened on a large round foyer. The floor was carpeted in a dusky pink shade that exactly matched the hue of the rose. Across from the ele-vaydor was a glass door with THE TET CORPORATION lettered on it. Beyond, Roland saw another, smaller lobby where a woman sat at a desk, apparently
talking to herself. To the right of the outer lobby door were two men wearing business suits. They were chatting to each other, hands in pockets, seemingly relaxed, but Roland saw they were anything but. And they were armed. The coats of their suits were well-tailored, but a man who knows how to look for a gun usually sees one, if a gun is there. These two fellows would stand in this foyer for an hour, maybe two (it was difficult for even good men to remain totally alert for much longer), falling into their little just-chatting routine each time the ele-vaydor came, ready to move instantly if they smelled something wrong. Roland approved.
He didn’t spend much time looking at the guards, however. Once he had identified them for what they were, he let his gaze go where it had wanted to be from the moment the ele-vaydor doors opened. There was a large black-and-white picture on the wall to his left. This was a photograph (he had originally thought the word was fottergraf) about five feet long and three wide, mounted without a frame, curved so cunningly to the shape of the wall that it looked like a hole into some unnaturally still reality. Three men in jeans and open-necked shirts sat on the top rail of a fence, their boots hooked under the lowest rail. How many times, Roland wondered, had he seen cowboys or pastorillas sitting just that way while they watched branding, roping, gelding, or the breaking of wild horses? How many times had he sat so himself, sometimes with one or more of his old tet—Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie DeCurry—sitting to either side of him, as John Cullum and Aaron Deepneau sat flanking the black man with the gold-rimmed spectacles and the tiny white moustache? The remembering made him ache, and this was no mere ache of the mind; his stomach clenched and his heart sped up. The three in the picture had been caught laughing at something, and the result was a kind of timeless perfection, one of those rare moments when men are glad to be what they are and where they are.
“The Founding Fathers,” Nancy said. She sounded both amused and sad. “That photo was taken on an executive retreat in 1986. Taos, New Mexico. Three city boys in cow country, how about that. And don’t they look like they’re having the time of their lives?”
“You say true,” Roland said.
“Do you know all three?”
Roland nodded. He knew them, all right, although he had never met Moses Carver, the man in the middle. Dan Holmes’s partner, Odetta Holmes’s godfather. In the picture he looked to be a robust and healthy seventy, but surely by 1986 he had to be closer to eighty. Perhaps eighty-five. Of course, Roland reminded himself, there was a wild card here: the marvelous thing he’d just seen in the lobby of this building. The rose was no more a fountain of youth than the turtle in the little pocket park across the street was the real Maturin, but did he think it had certain beneficent qualities? Yes he did. Certain healing qualities? Yes he did. Did he believe that the nine years of life Aaron Deepneau had gotten between 1977 and the taking of this picture in 1986 had just been a matter of the Prim-replacing pills and medical treatments of the old people? No he did not. These three men—Carver, Cullum, and Deepneau—had come together, almost magically, to fight for the rose in their old age. Their tale, the gunslinger believed, would make a book in itself, very likely a fine and exciting one. What Roland believed was simplicity itself: the rose had shown its gratitude.
“When did they die?” he asked Nancy Deepneau.
“John Cullum went first, in 1989,” she said. “Victim of a gunshot wound. He lasted twelve hours in the hospital, long enough for everyone to say goodbye. He was in New York for the annual board meeting. According to the NYPD, it was a streetside mugging gone bad. We believe he was killed by an agent of either Sombra or North Central Positronics. Probably one of the can-toi. There were other attempts that missed.”
“Both Sombra and Positronics come to the same thing,” said Roland. “They’re the agencies of the Crimson King in this world.”
“We know,” she said, then pointed to the man on the left side of the picture, the one she so strongly resembled. “Uncle Aaron lived until 1992. When you met him…in 1977?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
“In 1977, no one would have believed he could live so long.”
“Did the fayen-folken kill him, too?”
“No, the cancer came back, that’s all. He died in his bed. I was there. The last thing he said was, ‘Tell Roland we did our best.’ And so I do tell you.”
“Thankee-sai.” He heard the roughness in his voice and hoped she would mistake it for curtness. Many had done their best for him, was it not true? A great many, beginning with Susan Delgado, all those years ago.
“Are you all right?” she asked in a low, sympathetic voice.
“Yes,” he said. “Fine. And Moses Carver? When did he pass?”
She raised her eyebrows, then laughed.
“What—?”
“Look for yourself!”
She pointed toward the glass doors. Now approaching them from the inside, passing the desk-minding woman who had apparently been talking to herself, was a wizened man with fluffy fly-away hair and white eyebrows to match. His skin was dark, but the woman upon whose arm he leaned was even darker. He was tall—perhaps six-and-three, if the bend had been taken out of his spine—but the woman was even taller, at least six-and-six. Her face was not beautiful but almost savagely handsome. The face of a warrior.
The face of a gunslinger.
Nine
Had Moses Carver’s spine been straight, he and Roland would have been eye-to-eye. As it was, Carver needed to look up slightly, which he did by cocking his head, birdlike. He seemed incapable of actually bending his neck; arthritis had locked it in place. His eyes were brown, the whites so muddy it was difficult to tell where the irises ended, and they were full of merry laughter behind their gold-rimmed spectacles. He still had the tiny white moustache.
“Roland of Gilead!” said he. “How I’ve longed to meet you, sir! I b’lieve it’s what’s kept me alive so long after John and Aaron passed. Let loose of me a minute, Marian, let loose! There’s something I have to do!”
Marian Carver let go of him and looked at Roland. He didn’t hear her voice in his head and didn’t need to; what she wanted to tell him was clear in her eyes: Catch him if he falls, sai.
But the man Susannah had called Daddy Mose didn’t fall. He put his loosely clenched, arthritic fist to his forehead, then bent his right knee, taking all of his weight on his trembling right leg. “Hile you last gunslinger, Roland Deschain out of Gilead, son of Steven and true descendent of Arthur Eld. I, the last of what was called among ourselves the Ka-Tet of the Rose, salute you.”
Roland put his own fisted hand to his forehead and did more than make a leg; he went to his knee. “Hile Daddy Mose, godfather of Susannah, dinh of the Ka-Tet of the Rose, I salute you with my heart.”
“Thankee,” said the old man, and then laughed like a boy. “We’re well met in the House of the Rose! What was once meant to be the Grave of the Rose! Ha! Tell me we’re not! Can you?”
“Nay, for it would be a lie.”
“Speak it!” the old man cried, then uttered that cheery go-to-hell laugh once again. “But I’m f’gettin my manners in my awe, gunslinger. This handsome stretch of woman standing beside me, it’d be natural for you to call her my granddaughter, ’cause I was sem’ty in the year she was born, which was nineteen-and-sixty-nine. But the truth is”—But’na troof is was what reached Roland’s ear—“that sometimes the best things in life are started late, and having children”—Chirrun—“is one of’m, in my opinion. Which is a long-winded way of saying this is my daughter, Marian Odetta Carver, President of the Tet Corporation since I stepped down in ’97, at the age of ninety-eight. And do you think it would frost some country-club balls, Roland, to know that this business, now worth just about ten billion dollars, is run by a Negro?” His accent, growing deeper as his excitement and joy grew, turned the last into Dis bid’ness, now wuth jus ’bout tin binnion dolla, is run bah NEE-grow?
“Stop, Dad,” the tall woman beside him said. Her voice was kind but brooked no
denial. “You’ll have that heart monitor you wear sounding the alarm if you don’t, and this man’s time is short.”
“She run me like a ray’road!” the old man cried indignantly. At the same time he turned his head slightly and dropped Roland a wink of inexpressible slyness and good humor with the eye his daughter could not see.
As if she wasn’t onto your tricks, old man, Roland thought, amused even in his sorrow. As if she hasn’t been on to them for many and many a year—say delah.
Marian Carver said, “We’d palaver with you for just a little while, Roland, but first there’s something I need to see.”
“Ain’t a bit o’ need for that!” the old man said, his voice cracking with indignation. “Not a bit o’ need, and you know it! Did I raise a jackass?”
“He’s very likely right,” Marian said, “but always safe—”
“—never sorry,” the gunslinger said. “It’s a good rule, aye. What is it you’d see? What will tell you that I am who I say I am, and you believe I am?”
“Your gun,” she said.
Roland took the Old Home Days shirt out of the leather bag, then pulled out the holster. He unwrapped the shell-belt and pulled out his revolver with the sandalwood grips. He heard Marian Carver draw in a sharp, awed breath and chose to ignore it. He noticed that the two guards in their well-cut suits had drawn close, their eyes wide.
“You see it!” Moses Carver shouted. “Aye, every one of you here! Say God! Might as well tell your gran-babbies you saw Excalibur, the Sword of Arthur, for’t comes to the same!”
Roland held his father’s revolver out to Marian. He knew she would need to take it in order to confirm who he was, that she must do this before leading him into the Tet Corporation’s soft belly (where the wrong someone could do terrible damage), but for a moment she was unable to fulfill her responsibility. Then she steeled herself and took the gun, her eyes widening at the weight of it. Careful to keep all of her fingers away from the trigger, she brought the barrel up to her eyes and then traced a bit of the scrollwork near the muzzle: