by Stephen King
PART ONE RIDDLES CHAPTER IV TOPEKA
1
Jake stood on the slightly tilted roof of Blame the Mono, looking southeast along the Path of the Beam. The wind riffled his hair (now quite long and decidedly un-Piperish) back from his temples and forehead in waves. His eyes were wide with surprise.
He didn't know what he had expected to see - a smaller and more provincial version of Lud, perhaps - but what he had not expected was what loomed above the trees of a nearby park. It was a green roadsign (against the dull gray autumn sky, it almost screamed with color) with a blue shield mounted on it:
Roland joined him, lifted Oy gently out of his shirt, and put him down. The humbler sniffed the pink surface of Blaine's roof, then looked toward the front of the mono. Here the train's smooth bullet shape was broken by crumpled metal which had peeled back in jagged wings. Two dark slashes - they began at the mono's tip and extended to a point about ten yards from where Jake and Roland stood - gored the roof in parallel lines. At the end of each was a wide, flat metal pole painted in stripes of yellow and black. These seemed to jut from the top of the mono at a point just forward of the Barony Coach. To Jake they looked a little like football goalposts.
"Those are the piers he talked about hitting," Susannah murmured.
Roland nodded.
"We got off lucky, big boy, you know it? If this thing had been going much faster . . . "
"Ka, " Eddie said from behind them. He sounded as if he might be smiling.
Roland nodded. "Just so. Ka. "
Jake dismissed the transteel goalposts and turned back toward the sign. He was half convinced it would be gone, or that it would say something else (mid-world toll road, perhaps, or beware of demons), but it was still there and still said the same thing.
"Eddie? Susannah? Do you see that?"
They looked along his pointing finger. For a moment - one long enough for Jake to fear he was having a hallucination - neither of them said anything. Then, softly, Eddie said: "Holy shit. Are we back home? If we are, where are all the people? And if something like Blaine has been stopping off in Topeka - our Topeka, Topeka, Kansas - how come I haven't seen anything about it on Sixty Minutes?"
"What's Sixty Minutes'?" Susannah asked. She was shading her eyes, looking southeast toward the sign.
"TV show," Eddie said. "You missed it by five or ten years. Old white guys in ties. Doesn't matter. That sign - "
"It's Kansas, all right," Susannah said. "Our Kansas. I guess. " She had spotted another sign, just visible over the trees. Now she pointed until Jake, Eddie, and Roland had all seen it:
"There a Kansas in your world, Roland?"
"No," Roland replied, looking at the signs, "we're far beyond the boundaries of the world I knew. I was far beyond most of the world I knew long before I met you three. This place . . . "
He stopped and cocked his head to one side, as if he was listening to some sound almost too distant to hear. And the expression on his face . . . Jake didn't like it much.
"Say, kiddies!" Eddie said brightly. "Today we're studying Wacky Geography in Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come to the Dark Tower . . . which happens to be smack in the middle of everything. First, fight the giant lobsters! Next, ride the psychotic train! And then, after a visit to our snackbar for a popkin or two - "
"Do you hear anything?" Roland broke in. "Any of you?"
Jake listened. He heard the wind combing through the trees of the nearby park - their leaves had just begun to turn - and he heard the click of Oy's toenails as he strolled back toward them along the roof of the Barony Coach. Then Oy stopped, so even that sound -
A hand seized him by the arm, making him jump. It was Susannah. Her head was tilted, her eyes wide. Eddie was also listening. Oy, too; his ears were up and he was whining far down in his throat.
Jake felt his arms ripple with gooseflesh. At the same time he felt his mouth tighten in a grimace. The sound, though very faint, was the auditory version of biting a lemon. And he'd heard something like it before. Back when he was only five or six, there had been a crazy guy in Central Park who thought he was a musician . . . well, there were lots of crazy guys in Central Park who thought they were musicians, but this was the only one Jake had ever seen who played a workshop tool. The guy had had a sign beside his upturned hat which read world's greatest SAW-PLAYER! SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN'T IT! PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO MY WELFARE!
Greta Shaw had been with Jake the first time he encountered the saw-player, and Jake remembered how she had hurried past the guy. Just sitting there like a cellist in a symphony orchestra he'd been, only with a rust-speckled handsaw spread across his open legs; Jake remembered the expression of comic horror on Mrs. Shaw's face, and the quiver of her pressed-together lips, as if - yes, as if she'd just bitten into a lemon.
This sound wasn't exactly like the one
(SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN'T IT)
the guy in the park had made by vibrating the blade of his saw, but it was close: a wavery, trembly, metallic sound that made you feel like your sinuses were filling up and your eyes would shortly begin to gush water. Was it coming from ahead of them? Jake couldn't tell. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere; at the same time, it was so low he might have been tempted to believe the whole thing was just his imagination, if the others hadn't -
"Watch out!" Eddie cried. "Help me, you guys! I think he's going to faint!"
Jake wheeled toward the gunslinger and saw that his face had gone as white as cottage cheese above the dusty no-color of his shirt. His eyes were wide and blank. One corner of his mouth twitched spastically, as if an invisible fishhook were buried there.
"Jonas and Reynolds and Depape," he said. "The Big Coffin Hunters. And her. The Coos. They were the ones. They were the ones who - "
Standing on the roof of the mono in his dusty, broken boots, Roland tottered. On his face was the greatest look of misery Jake had ever seen.
"Oh Susan," he said. "Oh, my dear. "
2
They caught him, they formed a protective ring around him, and the gunslinger felt hot with guilt and self-loathing. What had he done to deserve such enthusiastic protectors? What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?
He tried to tell them he was all right, they could stand back, he was fine, but no words would come out; that terrible wavery sound had transported him back to the box canyon west of Hambry all those years ago. Depape and Reynolds and old limping Jonas. Yet most of all it was the woman from the hill he hated, and from black depths of feeling only a very young man can reach. Ah, but how could he have done aught else but hate them? His heart had been broken. And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.
My first thought was, he lied in every word/That hoary cripple, with malicious eye . . .
What words? Whose poem?
He didn't know, but he knew that women could lie, too; women who hopped and grinned and saw too much from the comers of their rheumy old eyes. It didn't matter who had written the lines of poesy; the words were true words, and that was all that mattered. Neither Eldred Jonas nor the crone on the hill had been of Marten's stature - nor even of Walter's - when it came to evil, but they had been evil enough.
Then, after. . . in the box canyon west of town . . . that sound . . . that, and the screams of wounded men and horses . . . for once in his life, even the normally voluble Cuthbert had been struck silent.
But all that had been long ago, in another when; in the here and now, the warbling sound was either gone or had temporarily fallen below the threshold of audibility. They would hear it again, though. He knew that as well as he knew the fact that he walked a road leading to damnation.
He looked up at the others and managed a smile. T
he trembling at the comer of his mouth had quit, and that was something.
"I'm all right," he said. "But hear me well: this is very close to where Mid-World ends, very close to where End-World begins. The first great course of our quest is finished. We have done well; we have remembered the faces of our fathers; we have stood together and been true to one another. But now we have come to a thinny. We must be very careful. "
"A thinny?" Jake asked, looking around nervously.
"Places where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away. There are more since the force of the Dark Tower began to fail. Do you remember what we saw below us when we left Lud?"
They nodded solemnly, remembering ground which had fused to black glass, ancient pipes which gleamed with turquoise witchlight, misshapen bird-freaks with wings like great leathern sails. Roland suddenly could not bear to have them grouped around him as they were, looking down on him as folk might look down on a rowdy who had fallen in a barroom brawl.
He lifted his hands to his friends - his new friends. Eddie took them and helped him to his feet. The gunslinger fixed his enormous will on not swaying and stood steady.
"Who was Susan?" Susannah asked. The crease down the center of her forehead suggested she was troubled, and probably by more than a coincidental similarity of names.
Roland looked at her, then at Eddie, then at Jake, who had dropped to one knee so he could scratch behind Oy's ears.
"I'll tell you," he said, "but this isn't the place or time. "
"You keep sayin that," Susannah said. "You wouldn't just be putting us off again, would you?"
Roland shook his head. "You shall hear my tale - this part of it, at least - but not on top of this metal carcass. "
"Yeah," Jake said. "Being up here is like playing on a dead dinosaur or something. I keep thinking Blaine's going to come back to life and start, I don't know, screwing around with our heads again. "
"That sound is gone," Eddie said. "The thing that sounded like a wah-wah pedal. "
"It reminded me of this old guy I used to see in Central Park,"
Jake said.
"The man with the saw?" Susannah asked. Jake looked up at her, his eyes round with surprise, and she nodded. "Only he wasn't old when I used to see him. It's not just the geography that's wacky here. Time's kind of funny, too. "
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brief squeeze. "Amen to that. "
Susannah turned to Roland. her look was not accusing, but there was a level and open measurement in her eyes that the gunslinger could not help but admire. "I'm holding you to your promise, Roland. I want to know about this girl that got my name. "
"You shall hear," Roland repeated. "For now, though, let's get off this monster's back. "
3
That was easier said than done. Blaine had come to rest slightly askew in an outdoor version of the Cradle of Lud (a littered trail of torn pink metal lay along one side of this, marking the end of Blaine's last journey), and it was easily twenty-five feet from the roof of the Barony Coach to the cement. If there was a descent-ladder, like the one which had popped conveniently through the emergency hatch, it had jammed when they crunched to a halt.
Roland unslung his purse, rummaged, and removed the deerskin harness they used for carrying Susannah when the going got too rough for her wheelchair. The chair, at least, would not worry them anymore, the gunslinger reflected; they had left it behind in their mad scramble to board Blaine.
"What you want that for?" Susannah asked truculently. She always sounded truculent when the harness came into view. I hate them honky mahfahs down in Miss'ippi worse'n I hate that harness, she had once told Eddie in the voice of Detta Walker, but sometimes it be a close thing, sugar.
"Soft, Susannah Dean, soft," the gunslinger said, smiling a little. He unbraided the network of straps which made up the harness, set the seat-piece aside, then pigtailed the straps back together. He wedded this to his last good hank of rope with an old-fashioned sheetbend knot. As he worked, he listened for the warbling of the thinny . . . as thefour of them had listened for the god-drums; as he and Eddie had listened for the lobstrosities to begin asking their lawyerly questions ("Dad-a-cham? Did-a-chee? Dum-a-chum?") as they came tumbling out of the waves each night.
Ka is a wheel, he thought. Or, as Eddie liked to say, whatever went around came around.
When the rope was finished, he fashioned a loop at the bottom of the braided section. Jake stepped a foot into it with perfect confidence, gripped the rope with one hand, and settled Oy into the crook of his other arm. Oy looked around nervously, whined, stretched his neck, licked Jake's face.
"You're not afraid, are you?" Jake asked the humbler.
" 'Fraid," Oy agreed, but he was quiet enough as Roland and Eddie lowered Jake down the side of the Barony Coach. The rope wasn't quite long enough to take him all the way down, but Jake had no trouble twisting his foot free and dropping the last four feet. He set Oy down. The bumbler trotted off, sniffing, and lifted his leg against the side of the terminal building. This was nowhere near as grand as the Cradle of Lud, but it had an old-fashioned look that Roland liked - white boards, overhanging eaves, high, narrow windows, what looked like slate shingles. It was a Western look. Written in gold gilt on a sign which stretched above the terminal's line of doors was this message:
ATCHISON, TOPEKA, AND SANTA FE
Towns, Roland supposed, and that last one sounded familiar to him; had there not been a Santa Fe in the Barony of Mejis? But that led back toward Susan, lovely Susan at the window with her hair unbraided and all down her back, the smell of her like jasmine and rose and honeysuckle and old sweet hay, smells of which the oracle in the mountains had been able to make only the palest mimicry. Susan lying back and looking solemnly up at him, then smiling and putting her hands behind her head so that her breasts rose, as if aching for his hands.
If you love me, Roland, then love me . . . bird and bear and hare and fish. . .
". . . next?"
He looked around at Eddie, having to use all of his will to pull himself back from Susan Delgado's when. There were thinnies here in Topeka, all right, and of many sorts. "My mind was wandering, Eddie. Cry your pardon. "
"Susannah next? That's what I asked. "
Roland shook his head. "You next, then Susannah. I'll go last. "
"Will you be okay? With your hand and all?"
"I'll be fine. "
Eddie nodded and stuck his foot into the loop. When Eddie had first come into Mid-World, Roland could have lowered him easily by himself, two fingers short the full complement or no, but Eddie had been without his drug for months now, and had put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle. Roland accepted Susannah's help gladly enough, and together they lowered him down.
"Now you, lady," Roland said, and smiled at her. It felt more natural to smile these days.
"Yes. " But for the nonce she only stood there, biting her lower lip.
"What is it?"
Her hand went to her stomach and rubbed there, as if it ached or griped her. He thought she would speak, but she shook her head and said, "Nothing. "
"I don't believe that. Why do you rub your belly? Are you hurt? Were you hurt when we stopped?"
She took her hand off her tunic as if the flesh just south of her navel had grown hot. "No. I'm fine. "
"Are you?"
Susannah seemed to think this over very carefully. "We'll talk," she said at last. "We'll palaver, if you like that better. But you were right before, Roland - this isn't the place or time. "
"All four of us, or just you and me and Eddie?"
"Just you and me, Roland," she said, and poked the stump of her leg through the loop. "Just one hen and one rooster, at least to start with. Now lower away, if you please. "
He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea - the one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rubbing hand - wa
s wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned there had had its way with her while Jake was trying to cross between the worlds. Sometimes - often - demonic contact changed things.
Never for the better, in Roland's experience.
He pulled his rope back up after Eddie had caught Susannah around the waist and helped her to the platform. The gunslinger walked forward to one of the piers which had torn through the train's bullet snout, fashioning the rope's end into a shake-loop as he went. He tossed this over the pier, snubbed it (being careful not to twitch the rope to the left), and then lowered himself to the platform himself, bent at the waist and leaving boot-tracks on Blaine's pink side.
"Too bad to lose the rope and harness," Eddie remarked when Roland was beside them.
"I ain't sorry about that harness," Susannah said. "I'd rather crawl along the pavement until I got chewin-gum all the way up my arms to the elbows. "
"We haven't lost anything," Roland said. He snugged his hand into the rawhide foot-loop and snapped it hard to the left. The rope slithered down from the pier, Roland gathering it in almost as fast as it came down.
"Neat trick!" Jake said.
"Eat! Rick!" Oy agreed.
"Cort?" Eddie asked.
"Cort," Roland agreed, smiling.
"The drill instructor from hell," Eddie said. "Better you than me, Roland. Better you than me. "
4
As they walked toward the doors leading into the station, that low, liquid warbling sound began again. Roland was amused to see all three of his cohorts wrinkle their noses and pull down the comers of their mouths at the same time; it made them look like blood family as well as ka-tet. Susannah pointed toward the park. The signs looming over the "trees were wavering slightly, the way things did in a heat-haze.
"Is that from the thinny?" Jake asked.
Roland nodded.
"Will we be able to get around it?"
"Yes. Thinnies are dangerous in much the way that swamps full of quicksand and saligs are dangerous. Do you know those things?"
"We know quicksand," Jake said. "And if saligs are long green things with big teeth, we know them, too. "
"That's what they are. "
Susannah turned to look back at Blaine one last time. "No silly questions and no silly games. The book was right about that. " From Blaine she turned her eyes to Roland. "What about Beryl Evans, the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Do you think she's part of this? That we might even meet her? I'd like to thank her. Eddie figured it out, but - "
"It's possible, I suppose," Roland said, "but on measure, I think not. My world is like a huge ship that sank near enough shore for most of the wreckage to wash up on the beach. Much of what we find is fascinating, some of it may be useful, if ka allows, but all of it is still wreckage. Senseless wreckage. " He looked around. "Like this place, I think. "
"I wouldn't exactly call it wrecked," Eddie said. "Look at the paint on the station - it's a little rusty from the gutters up under the eaves, but it hasn't peeled anywhere that I can see. " He stood in front of the doors and ran his fingers down one of the glass panels. They left four clear tracks behind. "Dust and plenty of it, but no cracks. I'd say that this building has been left unmaintained at most since . . . the start of the summer, maybe?"
He looked at Roland, who shrugged and nodded. He was listening with only half an ear and paying attention with only half a mind. The rest of him was fixed upon two things: the warble of the thinny, and keeping away the memories that wanted to swamp him.
"But Lud had been going to wrack and ruin for centuries" Susannah said. "This place . . . it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don't remember that one, but - "
"Yes, I do," Eddie and Jake said in perfect unison, then looked at each other and laughed. Eddie stuck out his hand and Jake slapped it.
"They still show the reruns," Jake said.
"Yeah, all the time," Eddie added. "Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who look like shorthair terriers. And you're right. This place isn't like Lud. Why would it be? It's not in the same world as Lud. I don't know where we crossed over, but - " He pointed again at the blue Interstate 70 shield, as if that proved his case beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"If it's Topeka, where are the people?" Susannah asked.
Eddie shrugged and raised his hands - who knows?
Jake put his forehead against the glass of the center door, cupped his hands to the sides of his face, and peered in. He looked for several seconds, then saw something that made him pull back fast. "Oh-oh," he said. "No wonder the town's so quiet. "
Roland stepped up behind Jake and peered in over the boy's head, cupping his own hands to reduce his reflection. The gunslinger drew two conclusions before even looking at what Jake had seen. The first was that although this was most assuredly a train station, it wasn't really a Blame station . . . not a cradle. The other was that the station did indeed belong to Eddie's, Jake's, and Susannah's world . . . but perhaps not to their where.
It's the thinny. We'll have to be careful.
Two corpses were leaning together on one of the long benches that filled most of the room; but for their hanging, wrinkled faces and black hands, they might have been revellers who had fallen asleep in the station after an arduous party and missed the last train home. On the wall behind them was a board marked departures, with the names of cities and towns and baronies marching down it in a line. denver, read one. wichita, read another. omaha, read a third. Roland had once known a one-eyed gambler named Omaha; he had died with a knife in his throat at a Watch Me table. He had stepped into the clearing at the end of the path with his head thrown back, and his last breath had sprayed blood all the way up to the ceiling. Hanging down from the ceiling of this room (which Roland's stupid and laggard mind insisted on thinking of as a stage rest, as if this were a stop along some half-forgotten road like the one that had brought him to Tull) was a beautiful four-sided clock. Its hands had stopped at 4:14, and Roland supposed they would never move again. It was a sad thought. . . but this was a sad world. He could not see any other dead people, but experience suggested that where there were two dead, there were likely four more dead somewhere out of sight. Or four dozen.
"Should we go in?" Eddie asked.
"Why?" the gunslinger countered. "We have no business here; it doesn't lie along the Path of the Beam. "
"You'd make a great tour-guide," Eddie said sourly. " 'Keep up, everyone, and please don't go wandering off into the - ' "
Jake interrupted with a request Roland didn't understand. "Do either of you guys have a quarter?" The boy was looking at Eddie and Susannah. Beside him was a square metal box. Written on it in blue was:
The Topeka Capital-Journal covers Kansas like no other! Your hometown paper! Read it every day!
Eddie shook his head, amused. "Lost all my change at some point. Probably climbing a tree, just before you joined us, in an all-out effort to avoid becoming snack-food for a robot bear. Sorry. "
"Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . . " Susannah had her purse open and was rummaging through it in a way that made Roland grin broadly in spite of all his preoccupations. It was so damned womanly, somehow. She turned over crumpled Kleenex, shook them to make sure there was nothing caught inside, fished out a compact, looked at it, dropped it back, came up with a comb, dropped that back -
She was too absorbed to look up as Roland strode past her, drawing his gun from the docker's clutch he had built her as he went. He fired a single time. Susannah let out a little scream, dropping her purse and slapping at the empty holster high up under her left breast.
"Honky, you scared the livin Jesus out of me!"
"Take better care of your gun, Susannah, or the next time someone takes it from you, the hole may be between your eyes instead of in a . . . what is it, Jake? A news-telling device of s
ome kind? Or does it hold paper?"
"Both. " Jake looked startled. Oy had withdrawn halfway down the platform and was looking at Roland mistrustfully. Jake poked his finger at the bullet-hole in the center of the newspaper box's locking device. A little curl of smoke was drifting from it.
"Go on," Roland said. "Open it. "
Jake pulled the handle. It resisted for a moment, then a piece of metal clunked down somewhere inside, and the door opened. The box itself was empty; the sign on the back wall read when all papers are gone, please take display copy. Jake worked it out of its wire holder, and they all gathered round.
"What in God's name . . . ?" Susannah's whisper was both horrified and accusing. "What does it mean? What in God's name happened^"
Below the newspaper's name, taking up most of the front page's top half, were screaming black letters:
"CAPTAIN TRIPS" SUPERFLU RAGES UNCHECKED
Govt. Leaders May Have Fled Country
Topeka Hospitals Jammed with Sick, Dying
Millions Pray for Cure
"Read it aloud," Roland said. "The letters are in your speech, I cannot make them all out, and I would know this story very well. "
Jake looked at Eddie, who nodded impatiently.
Jake unfolded the newspaper, revealing a dot-picture (Roland had seen pictures of this type; they were called "fottergrafs") which shocked them all: it showed a lakeside city with its skyline in flames. cleveland fires burn unchecked, the caption beneath read.
"Read, kid!" Eddie told him. Susannah said nothing; she was already reading the story - the only one on the front page - over his shoulder. Jake cleared his throat as if it were suddenly dry, and began.
5
"The byline says John Corcoran, plus staff and AP reports. That means a lot of different people worked on it, Roland. Okay. Here goes. 'America's greatest crisis - and the world's, perhaps - deepened overnight as the so-called superflu, known as Tube-Neck in the Midwest and Captain Trips in California, continues to spread.
" 'Although the death-toll can only be estimated, medical experts say the total at this point is horrible beyond comprehension: twenty to thirty million dead in the continental U. S. alone is the estimate given by Dr. Morris Hackford of Topeka's St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Bodies are being burned from Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massachusetts, in crematoria, factory furnaces, and at landfill sites.
" 'Here in Topeka, the bereaved who are still well enough and strong enough to do so are urged to take their dead to one of three sites: the disposal plant north of Oakland Billard Park; the pit area at Heartland Park Race Track; the landfill on Southeast Sixty-first Street, east of Forbes Field. Landfill users should approach by Berryton Road; California has been blocked by car wrecks and at least one downed Air Force transport plane, sources tell us. ' "
Jake glanced up at his friends with frightened eyes, looked behind him at the silent railway station, then looked back down at the newspaper.
" 'Dr. April Montoya of the Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center points out that the death-toll, horrifying as it is, constitutes only part of this terrible story. "For every person who has died so far as a result of this new flu-strain," Montoya said, "there are another six who are lying ill in their homes, perhaps as many as a dozen. And, so far as we have been able to determine, the recovery rate is zero. " Coughing, she then told this reporter: "Speaking personally, I'm not making any plans for the weekend. "
" 'In other local developments:
" 'All commercial flights out of Forbes and Phillip Billard have been cancelled.
" 'All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further notice.
" 'All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.
" 'Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a "slow shutdown" of the Kaw River Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke's Office of Public Relations answered this newspaper's calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to on-line status, the announcement concludes, "when the current crisis is past. " Any comfort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded statement's final words, which are not "Goodbye" or "Thank you for calling" but "God will help us through our time of trial. " ' "
Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud. When the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker's stone what came out of the hat, Maud had said. We set him to dance. Except, of course, what she'd meant was that they had set him to hang. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.
Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible. Like the god-drums, Susannah thought, and shuddered.
" 'In national developments,' " Jake read, " 'conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu's existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green Valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.
" ' "They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi sewer-rats at the end of World War II," said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas's first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: "Why should I? I've got a real fine case myself. I'll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week. "
" 'Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.
" 'A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium was apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, but occurred as the result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised . . . ' "
Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.
"No, Oy, I don't want it," Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.
"At least we know where all the folks are," Susannah said, bending and taking the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t'other one died, beloved of them-and-those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of the type which convinced her it was all real.
But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end, she thought, and a lump rose in her throat. How hard they tried.
She folded the quarto together and looked on the back - the last page of the Capital-Journal. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark words in huge type:<
br />
PRAY FOR US
She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger's world a year later.
He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. "No. I can't explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing - everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn't it, Roland?"
The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. "Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no. "
"There was something called Legionnaires' disease," Eddie said. "And AIDS, of course - "
"That's the sex one, right?" Susannah asked. "Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?"
"Yes, but calling gays fruits isn't the done thing in my when," Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.
"So this . . . this never happened," Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.
"But it did," Roland said. "It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie's right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this 'superflu' was this past June-sowing. We're in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That's the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it's not Eddie's. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived. " He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. "You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it's one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: 'Go, then, there are other worlds than these. ' "
"More riddles," Eddie said, scowling.
"Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons. "
Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. "You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth. "
Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said - You lie when it suits your purpose - but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.
"We went back to time's pool," the gunslinger said, "and pulled him out before he could drown. "
"You pulled him out," Eddie corrected.
"You helped, though," Roland said, "if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It's beside the point. What's more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors . . . only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach. "
"How big?" Eddie asked. "As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?"
Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky - who knows?
"This thinny," Susannah said. "We're not just near it, are we? We came through it. That's how we got here, to this version of Topeka. "
"We may have," Roland admitted. "Did any of you feel something strange? A sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?"
They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his head this time.
"No," Roland said, as if he had expected this. "But we were concentrating on the riddling - "
"Concentrating on not getting killed," Eddie grunted.
"Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren't natural - they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds. "
"Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower," Eddie said.
Roland nodded. "And even if this place - this when, this where - is not the ka of your world now, it might become that ka. This plague - or others even worse - could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I've seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first . . . the first one 1 ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry. " He rubbed his hand up his cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles. Love me, Roland. If you love me, then love me.
"Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland," Jake said. "We've fallen off the Beam. Look. " He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving slowly above them, but no longer in the direction Blame's smashed snout was pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they had grown so used to following were gone.
"Does it matter?" Eddie asked. "I mean . . . the Beam may be gone, but the Tower exists in all worlds, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Roland said, "but it may not be accessible from all worlds. "
The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bicycle messenger. Now he remembered certain office-building elevators he'd been in while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, mostly. There were some floors where you couldn't stop the car and get off unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was replaced by an X.
"I think," Roland said, "we need to find the Beam again. "
"I'm convinced," Eddie said. "Come on, let's get going. " He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. "Where?"
"The way we were going," Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.
