by Stephen King
“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”
“What about Oy?” Jake asked.
“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”
7
Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of I-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.
Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess, Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after—if someone had been around to do it after—that meant the plague hadn’t gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren’t the whole story.
There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not runny—mummies wearing seatbelts, for the most part. The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, she supposed, but she guessed that wasn’t the only reason they had taken to their feet.
Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steering wheel to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fatal disease setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God’s open air. A hill would be best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
At one time Susannah guessed they would have been able to see many of the corpses of the fleeing dead, but not now. Because of the thinny. They approached it steadily, and she knew exactly when they entered it. A kind of tingling shudder ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all been stricken with the bellyache at the same time. Then Eddie and Roland straightened up. Jake bent to stroke Oy, who had been staring at him anxiously.
“You boys all right?” Susannah asked. The question came out in the half-querulous, half-humorous voice of Detta Walker. Using that voice was nothing she planned; sometimes it just came out.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though.” He was staring uneasily at the thinny. Its silvery blankness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn. Nearby, trees poked out of its silver surface, casting distorted reflections that never stayed quite still or quite in focus. A little farther away, Susannah could see a grain-storage tower, seeming to float. The words GADDISH FEEDS were written on the side in pink letters which might have been red under normal conditions.
“Feels to me like I got a bubble in my mind,” Eddie said. “Man, look at that shit shimmer.”
“Can you still hear it?” Susannah asked.
“Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?”
“Uh-huh. Let’s go.”
It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Susannah decided. They’d go for what felt like miles through that humming brightness that was not quite fog and not quite water, sometimes seeing shapes (a barn, a tractor, a Stuckey’s billboard) loom out of it, then losing everything but the road, which ran consistently above the thinny’s bright but somehow indistinct surface.
Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas . . .
Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn’t exactly have vistas, but there were open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, but at least you could see a by-God horizon off in the distance, and lose some of that unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back into the goop you went. Jake came closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thinny was like finally reaching the shining water-mirage you could often see far up the highway on hot days.
Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a frozen ocean.
Please help us get out of this, Susannah prayed to a God in whom she no longer precisely believed—she still believed in something, but since awakening to Roland’s world on the beach of the Western Sea, her concept of the invisible world had changed considerably. Please help us find the Beam again. Please help us escape this world of silence and death.
They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which read BIG SPRINGS 2 MI. Behind them, in the west, the setting sun shone through a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the thinny and lighting the windows and taillights of the stalled cars in tones of fire. On either side of them empty fields stretched away. Full Earth come and gone, Susannah thought. Reaping come and gone, too. This is what Roland calls closing the year. The thought made her shiver.
“We’ll camp here for the night,” Roland said soon after they had passed the Big Springs exit ramp. Up ahead they could see the thinny encroaching on the highway again, but that was miles farther on—you could see a damn long way in eastern Kansas, Susannah was discovering. “We can get firewood without going too near the thinny, and the sound won’t be too bad. We may even be able to sleep without bullets stuffed into our ears.”
Eddie and Jake climbed over the guardrails, descended the bank, and foraged for wood along a dry creekbed, staying together as Roland admonished them to do. When they came back, the clouds had gulped the sun again, and an ashy, uninteresting twilight had begun to creep over the world.
The gunslinger stripped twigs for kindling, then laid his fuel around them in his usual fashion, building a kind of wooden chimney in the breakdown lane. As he did it, Eddie strolled across to the median strip and stood there, hands in pockets, looking east. After a few moments, Jake and Oy joined him.
Roland produced his flint and steel, scraped fire into the shaft of his chimney, and soon the little campfire was burning.
“Roland!” Eddie called. “Suze! Come over here! Look at this!”
Susannah started rolling her chair toward Eddie, then Roland—after a final check of his campfire—took hold of the handles and pushed her.
“Look at what?” Susannah asked.
Eddie pointed. At first Susannah saw nothing, although the turnpike was perfectly visible even beyond the point where the thinny closed in again, perhaps three miles ahead. Then . . . yes, she might see something. Maybe. A kind of shape, at the farthest edge of vision. If not for the fading daylight . . .
“Is it a building?” Jake asked. “Cripes, it looks like it’s built right across the highway!”
“What about it, Roland?” Eddie asked. “You’ve got the best eyes in the universe.”
For a time the gunslinger said nothing, only looked up the median strip with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. At last he said, “We’ll see it better when we get closer.”
“Oh, come on!” Eddie said. “I mean, holy shit! Do you know what it is or not?”
“We’ll see it better when we get closer,” the gunslinger repeated . . . which was, of course, no answer at all. He moseyed back across the eastbound lanes to check on his campfire, bootheels clicking on the pavement. Susannah looked at Jake
and Eddie. She shrugged. They shrugged back . . . and then Jake burst into bright peals of laughter. Usually, Susannah thought, the kid acted more like an eighteen-year-old than a boy of eleven, but that laughter made him sound about nine-going-on-ten, and she didn’t mind a bit.
She looked down at Oy, who was looking at them earnestly and rolling his shoulders in an effort to shrug.
8
They ate the leaf-wrapped delicacies Eddie called gunslinger burritos, drawing closer to the fire and feeding it more wood as the dark drew down. Somewhere south a bird cried out—it was just about the loneliest sound he had ever heard in his life, Eddie reckoned. None of them talked much, and it occurred to him that, at this time of their day, hardly anyone ever did. As if the time when the earth swapped day for dark was special, a time that somehow closed them off from the powerful fellowship Roland called ka-tet.
Jake fed Oy small scraps of dried deermeat from his last burrito; Susannah sat on her bedroll, legs crossed beneath her hide smock, looking dreamily into the fire; Roland lay back on his elbows, looking up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to melt away from the stars. Looking up himself, Eddie saw that Old Star and Old Mother were gone, their places taken by Polaris and the Big Dipper. This might not be his world—Takuro automobiles, the Kansas City Monarchs, and a food franchise called Boing Boing Burgers all suggested it wasn’t—but Eddie thought it was too close for comfort. Maybe, he thought, the world next door.
When the bird cried in the distance again, he roused himself and looked at Roland. “You had something you were going to tell us,” he said. “A thrilling tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn’t it?”
For a moment longer the gunslinger continued to look up at the sky—now it was Roland who must find himself adrift in the constellations, Eddie realized—and then he shifted his gaze to his friends. He looked strangely apologetic, strangely uneasy. “Would you think I was cozening,” he said, “if I asked for one more day to think of these things? Or perhaps it’s a night to dream of them that I really want. They are old things, dead things, perhaps, but I . . .” He raised his hands in a kind of distracted gesture. “Some things don’t rest easy even when they’re dead. Their bones cry out from the ground.”
“There are ghosts,” Jake said, and in his eyes Eddie saw a shadow of the horror he must have felt inside the house in Dutch Hill. The horror he must have felt when the Doorkeeper came out of the wall and reached for him. “Sometimes there are ghosts, and sometimes they come back.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Sometimes there are, and sometimes they do.”
“Maybe it’s better not to brood,” Susannah said. “Sometimes—especially when you know a thing’s going to be hard—it’s better just to get on your horse and ride.”
Roland thought this over carefully, then raised his eyes to look at her. “At tomorrow night’s fire I will tell you of Susan,” he said. “This I promise on my father’s name.”
“Do we need to hear?” Eddie asked abruptly. He was almost astounded to hear this question coming out of his mouth; no one had been more curious about the gunslinger’s past than Eddie himself. “I mean, if it really hurts, Roland . . . hurts big-time . . . maybe . . .”
“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”
“Is it a Western?” Jake asked suddenly.
Roland looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t take your meaning, Jake. Gilead is a Barony of the Western World, yes, and Mejis as well, but—”
“It’ll be a Western,” Eddie said. “All Roland’s stories are Westerns, when you get right down to it.” He lay back and pulled his blanket over him. Faintly, from both east and west, he could hear the warble of the thinny. He checked in his pocket for the bullets Roland had given him, and nodded with satisfaction when he felt them. He reckoned he could sleep without them tonight, but he would want them again tomorrow. They weren’t done turnpikin’ just yet.
Susannah leaned over him, kissed the tip of his nose. “Done for the day, sugar?”
“Yep,” Eddie said, and laced his hands together behind his head. “It’s not every day that I hook a ride on the world’s fastest train, destroy the world’s smartest computer, and then discover that everyone’s been scragged by the flu. All before dinner, too. Shit like that makes a man tired.” Eddie smiled and closed his eyes. He was still smiling when sleep took him.
9
In his dream, they were all standing on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, looking over the short board fence and into the weedy vacant lot behind it. They were wearing their Mid-World clothes—a motley combination of deerskin and old shirts, mostly held together with spit and shoelaces—but none of the pedestrians hurrying by on Second seemed to notice. No one noticed the billy-bumbler in Jake’s arms or the artillery they were packing, either.
Because we’re ghosts, Eddie thought. We’re ghosts and we don’t rest easy.
On the fence there were handbills—one for the Sex Pistols (a reunion tour, according to the poster, and Eddie thought that was pretty funny—the Pistols was one group that was never going to get back together), one for a comic, Adam Sandler, that Eddie had never heard of, one for a movie called The Craft, about teenage witches. Beyond that one, written in letters the dusky pink of summer roses, was this:
See the BEAR of fearsome size!
All the WORLD’S within his eyes.
TIME grows thin, the past’s a riddle;
The TOWER awaits you in the middle.
“There,” Jake said, pointing. “The rose. See how it awaits us, there in the middle of the lot.”
“Yes, it’s very beautiful,” Susannah said. Then she pointed to the sign standing near the rose and facing Second Avenue. Her voice and her eyes were troubled. “But what about that?”
According to the sign, two outfits—Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate—were going to combine on something called Turtle Bay Condominiums, said condos to be erected on this very spot. When? COMING SOON was all the sign had to say in that regard.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jake said. “That sign was here before. It’s probably old as the hi—”
At that moment the revving sound of an engine tore into the air. From beyond the fence, on the Forty-sixth Street side of the lot, chugs of dirty brown exhaust ascended like bad-news smoke signals. Suddenly the boards on that side burst open, and a huge red bulldozer lunged through. Even the blade was red, although the words slashed across its scoop—ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING—were written in a yellow as bright as panic. Sitting in the peak-seat, his rotting face leering at them from above the controls, was the man who had kidnapped Jake from the bridge over the River Send—their old pal Gasher. On the front of his cocked-back hardhat, the words LAMERK FOUNDRY stood out in black. Above them, a single staring eye had been painted.
Gasher lowered the ’dozer’s blade. It tore across the lot on a diagonal, smashing brick, pulverizing beer and soda bottles to glittering powder, striking sparks from the rocks. Directly in its path, the rose nodded its delicate head.
“Let’s see you ask some of yer silly questions now!” this unwelcome apparition cried. “Ask all yer wants, my dear little culls, why not? Wery fond of riddles is yer old pal Gasher! Just so you understand that, no matter what yer ask, I’m gointer run that nasty thing over, mash it flat, aye, so I will! Then back over it I’ll go! Root and branch, my dear little culls! Aye, root and branch!”
Susannah shrieked as the scarlet bulldozer blade bore down on the rose, and Eddie grabbed for the fence. He would vault over it, throw himself on the rose, try to protect it . . .
. . . except it was too late. And he knew it.
He looked back up at the cackling thing in the bulldozer’s
peak-seat and saw that Gasher was gone. Now the man at the controls was Engineer Bob, from Charlie the Choo-Choo.
“Stop!” Eddie screamed. “For Christ’s sake, stop!”
“I can’t, Eddie. The world has moved on, and I can’t stop. I must move on with it.”
And as the shadow of the ’dozer fell over the rose, as the blade tore through one of the posts holding up the sign (Eddie saw COMING SOON had changed to COMING NOW), he realized that the man at the controls wasn’t Engineer Bob, either.
It was Roland.
10
Eddie sat up in the breakdown lane of the turnpike, gasping breath he could see in the air and with sweat already chilling on his hot skin. He was sure he had screamed, must have screamed, but Susannah still slept beside him with only the top of her head poking out of the bedroll they shared, and Jake was snoring softly off to the left, one arm out of his own blankets and curled around Oy. The bumbler was also sleeping.
Roland wasn’t. Roland sat calmly on the far side of the dead campfire, cleaning his guns by starlight and looking at Eddie.
“Bad dreams.” Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“A visit from your brother?”
Eddie shook his head.
“The Tower, then? The field of roses and the Tower?” Roland’s face remained impassive, but Eddie could hear the subtle eagerness which always came into his voice when the subject was the Dark Tower. Eddie had once called the gunslinger a Tower junkie, and Roland hadn’t denied it.
“Not this time.”
“What, then?”
Eddie shivered. “Cold.”
“Yes. Thank your gods there’s no rain, at least. Autumn rain’s an evil to be avoided whenever one may. What was your dream?”
Still Eddie hesitated. “You’d never betray us, would you, Roland?”
“No man can say that for sure, Eddie, and I have already played the betrayer more than once. To my shame. But . . . I think those days are over. We are one, ka-tet. If I betray any one of you—even Jake’s furry friend, perhaps—I betray myself. Why do you ask?”