by Stephen King
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 th
irsty because Jake was dead and he tried to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me—
“But none of that actually happened,” King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward the kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his increasingly long naps. The house is empty except for the two of them, and under those circumstances he often talks to himself. “I mean, you know that, don’t you? That none of it actually happened?”
He supposes he does, but it was so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise there, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is ever completely under the writer’s control, but this one is so out of control it’s ridiculous. It really is more like watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made-up story.
He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and forget the whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see the new Clint Eastwood movie, Bloodwork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow he’ll be back at his desk, and something from the film may slip out into the book—certainly Roland himself was partly Clint Eastwood to start with, Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name.
And…speaking of books…
Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor just this morning: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It contains, of course, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the narrative poem that lies at the root of King’s long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his face that stops just short of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King has always suspected dogs are fairly recent émigrés from that great I-know-just-how-you-
feel country of Empathica), Marlowe’s own fiendish grin appears to widen.
“One place for the poem, old boy,” King says, and tosses the book back onto the coffee-table. It’s a big ’un, and lands with a thud. “One place and one place only.” Then he settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes. Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he’s fooling himself, knowing he’ll almost certainly doze off. As he does.
Chapter I:
The Thing Under the Castle
One
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King’s Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean’s fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre’s desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them. These they destroyed, using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.
On Sayre’s wall were two framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy. He was shirtless, barefooted, tousle-haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a docker’s clutch. He looked about Jake’s age. This picture had a not-quite-pleasant sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or both might have been part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard homosexuals called in the Village. The boy’s hair was black. His eyes were blue. His lips were red. There was a livid scar on his side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse lay dead before him. There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy’s marked left foot rested on the horse’s flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph.
“That’s Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse,” Roland said. “Its image was carried into battle on the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In-World.”
“So according to this picture, the Crimson King wins?” she asked. “Or if not him then Mordred, his son?”
Roland raised his eyebrows. “Thanks to John Farson, the Crimson King’s men won the In-World lands long ago,” he said. But then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike his usual look that seeing it always made Susannah feel dizzy. “But I think we won the only battle that matters. What’s shown in this picture is no more than someone’s wishful fairy-tale.” Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the frame with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way down the middle as he did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he certainly meant to do, she stopped him and pointed to the bottom. Written there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was the artist’s name: Patrick Danville.
The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray black cylinder tapering upward. It stood at the far end of Can’-Ka No Rey, the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had seemed taller than the tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire State Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors—each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard’s glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. “That is where my quest ends.” His voice was low and awestruck. “This picture wasn’t done from any dream, Susannah. It’s as if I could touch the texture of every brick. Do you agree?”
“Yes.” It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre’s wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
“The person who painted it must have been there,” Roland mused. “Must have set up his easel in the very roses.”
“Patrick Danville,” she said. “It’s the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?”
“I see it very well.”
“And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?”
“Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead—”
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
“Is that the Crimson King?” she asked, pointing. She didn’t quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.”
“Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on the way by.” And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.
This time the gunslinger’s smile was faint and distracted. “I don’t think it will be so easy,” he said.
Susannah sighed. “Actually I don’t, either.”
They had what they’d come for—quite a bit more, in fact—but they still found it hard to leave Sayre’s office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn’t want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre’s desk and roll it up. Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.
&nb
sp; In the end, maybe it’s just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
“We’ll leave it,” he said. “Soon enough—in months, maybe even weeks—we’ll have the real thing to look at.”
“Do you say so?” she asked faintly. “Roland, do you really say so?”
“I do.”
“All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn’t you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn’t that how a writer would want it?”
“That doesn’t mean he can do it,” Roland said. “Stephen King’s not the water, Susannah—he’s only the pipe the water runs through.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely believe it.”
Roland wasn’t completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the battle of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
“I started lone-john, but that’s not how I’ll finish,” he said. She had been making her way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he plucked her out of it and settled her on his right hip, the one that no longer pained him. “You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the door, you’ll be with me when I climb the stairs, you’ll be with me when I deal with yon capering red goblin, and you’ll be with me when I enter the room at the top.”
Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her. In truth it felt like a lie to both of them.
Two
They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher’s knife, and a handy little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary kitchen.