by Stephen King
They did, and saw that the thin cirrus clouds had also picked up that herringbone pattern along the course of the Beam . . . and those clouds within the alley of its power were flowing faster than those to either side. They were being pushed southeast. Being pushed in the direction of the Dark Tower.
"You see? Even the clouds must obey."
A small flock of birds coursed toward them. As they reached the path of the Beam, they were all deflected toward the southeast for a moment. Although Eddie clearly saw this happen, his eyes could hardly credit it. When the birds had crossed the narrow corridor of the Beam's influence, they resumed their former course.
"Well," Eddie said, "I suppose we ought to get going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and all that shit."
"Wait a minute." Susannah was looking at Roland. "It isn't just a thousand miles, is it? Not anymore. How far are we talking about, Roland? Five thousand miles? Ten?"
"I can't say. It will be very far."
"Well, how in the hell we ever goan get there, with you two pushing me in this goddam wheelchair? We'll be lucky to make three miles a day through yonder Drawers, and you know it."
"The way has been opened," Roland said patiently, "and that's enough for now. The time may come, Susannah Dean, when we travel faster than you would like."
"Oh yeah?" She looked at him truculently, and both men could see Detta Walker dancing a dangerous hornpipe in her eyes again. "You got a race-car lined up? If you do, it might be nice if we had a damn road to run it on!"
"The land and the way we travel on it will change. It always does."
Susannah flapped a hand at the gunslinger; go on with you, it said. "You sound like my old mamma, sayin God will provide."
"Hasn't He?" Roland asked gravely.
She looked at him for a moment in silent surprise, then threw her head back and laughed at the sky. "Well, I guess that depends on how you look at it. All I can say is that if this is providin, Roland, I'd hate to see what'd happen if He decided to let us go hungry."
"Come on, let's do it," Eddie said. "I want to get out of this place. I don't like it." And that was true, but that wasn't all. He also felt a deep eagerness to set his feet upon that concealed path, that highway in hiding. Every step was a step closer to the field of roses and the Tower which dominated it. He realized--not without some wonder--that he meant to see that Tower . . . or die trying.
Congratulations, Roland, he thought. You've done it. I'm one of the converted. Someone say hallelujah.
"There's one other thing before we go." Roland bent and untied the rawhide lace around his left thigh. Then he slowly began to unbuckle his gunbelt.
"What's this jive?" Eddie. asked.
Roland pulled the gunbelt free and held it out to him. "You know why I'm doing this," he said calmly.
"Put it back on, man!" Eddie felt a terrible stew of conflicting emotions roiling inside him; could feel his fingers trembling even inside his clenched fists. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Losing my mind an inch at a time. Until the wound inside me closes--if it ever does--I am not fit to wear this. And you know it."
"Take it, Eddie," Susannah said quietly.
"If you hadn't been wearing this goddamn thing last night, when that bat came at me, I'd be gone from the nose up this morning!"
The gunslinger replied by continuing to hold his remaining gun out to Eddie. The posture of his body said he was prepared to stand that way all day, if that was what it took.
"All right!" Eddie cried. "Goddammit, all right!"
He snatched the gunbelt from Roland's hand and buckled it about his own waist in a series of rough gestures. He should have been relieved, he supposed--hadn't he looked at this gun, lying so close to Roland's hand in the middle of the night, and thought about what might happen if Roland really did go over the high side? Hadn't he and Susannah both thought about it? But there was no relief. Only fear and guilt and a strange, aching sadness far too deep for tears.
He looked so strange without his guns.
So wrong.
"Okay? Now that the numb-fuck apprentices have the guns and the master's unarmed, can we please go? If something big comes out of the bush at us, Roland, you can always throw your knife at it."
"Oh, that," he murmured. "I almost forgot." He took the knife from his purse and held it out, hilt first, to Eddie.
"This is ridiculous!" Eddie shouted.
"Life is ridiculous."
"Yeah, put it on a postcard and send it to the fucking Reader's Digest." Eddie jammed the knife into his belt and then looked defiantly at Roland. "Now can we go?"
"There is one more thing," Roland said.
"Weeping, creeping Jesus!"
The smile touched Roland's mouth again. "Just joking," he said.
Eddie's mouth dropped open. Beside him, Susannah began to laugh again. The sound rose, as musical as bells, in the morning stillness.
31
IT TOOK THEM MOST of the morning to clear the zone of destruction with which the great bear had protected itself, but the going was a little easier along the path of the Beam, and once they had put the deadfalls and tangles of underbrush behind them, deep forest took over again and they were able to move at better speed. The brook which had emerged from the rock wall in the clearing ran busily along to their right. It had been joined by several smaller streamlets, and its sound was deeper now. There were more animals here--they heard them moving through the woods, going about their daily round--and twice they saw small groups of deer. One of them, a buck with a noble rack of antlers on its upraised and questioning head, looked to be at least three hundred pounds. The brook bent away from their path as they began to climb again. And, as the afternoon began to slant down toward evening, Eddie saw something.
"Could we stop here? Rest a minute?"
"What is it?" Susannah asked.
"Yes," Roland said. "We can stop."
Suddenly Eddie felt Henry's presence again, like a weight settling on his shoulders. Oh lookit the sissy. Does the sissy see something in the twee? Does the sissy want to carve something? Does he? Ohhhh, ain't that CUTE?
"We don't have to stop. I mean, no big deal. I just--"
"--saw something," Roland finished for him. "Whatever it is, stop running your everlasting mouth and get it."
"It's really nothing." Eddie felt warm blood mount into his face. He tried to look away from the ash tree which had caught his eye.
"But it is. It's something you need, and that's a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don't need is a man who can't let go of the useless baggage of his memories."
The warm blood turned hot. Eddie stood with his flaming face pointed at his moccasins for a moment longer, feeling as if Roland had looked directly into his confused heart with his faded blue bombardier's eyes.
"Eddie?" Susannah asked curiously. "What is it, dear?"
Her voice gave him the courage he needed. He walked to the slim, straight ash, pulling Roland's knife from his belt.
"Maybe nothing," he muttered, and then forced himself to add: "Maybe a lot. If I don't fuck it up, maybe quite a lot."
"The ash is a noble tree, and full of power," Roland remarked from behind him, but Eddie barely heard. Henry's sneering, hectoring voice was gone; his shame was gone with it. He thought only of the one branch that had caught his eye. It thickened and bulged slightly as it ran into the trunk. It was this oddly shaped thickness that Eddie wanted.
He thought the shape of the key was buried within it--the key he had seen briefly in the fire before the burning remains of the jawbone had changed again and the rose had appeared. Three inverted V's, the center V both deeper and wider than the other two. And the little s-shape at the end. That was the secret.
A breath of his dream recurred: Dad-a-chum, dud-a-chee, not to worry, you've got the key.
Maybe, he thought. But this time I'll have to get all of it. I think that this time ninety per cent just won't do.
>
Working with great care, he cut the branch from the tree and then trimmed the narrow end. He was left with a fat chunk of ash about nine inches long. It felt heavy and vital in his hand, very much alive and willing enough to give up its secret shape . . . to a man skillful enough to tease it out, that was.
Was he that man? And did it matter?
Eddie Dean thought the answer to both questions was yes.
The gunslinger's good left hand closed over Eddie's right hand. "I think you know a secret."
"Maybe I do."
"Can you tell?"
He shook his head. "Better not to, I think. Not yet."
Roland thought this over, then nodded. "All right. I want to ask you one question, and then we'll drop the subject. Have you perhaps seen some way into the heart of my . . . my problem?"
Eddie thought: And that's as close as he'll ever come to showing the desperation that's eating him alive.
"I don't know. Right now I can't tell for sure. But I hope so, man. I really, really do."
Roland nodded again and released Eddie's hand. "I thank you. We still have two hours of good daylight--why don't we make use of them?"
"Fine by me."
They moved on. Roland pushed Susannah and Eddie walked ahead of them, holding the chunk of wood with the key buried in it. It seemed to throb with its own warmth, secret and powerful.
32
THAT NIGHT, AFTER SUPPER was eaten, Eddie took the gunslinger's knife from his belt and began to carve. The knife was amazingly sharp, and seemed never to lose its edge. Eddie worked slowly and carefully in the firelight, turning the chunk of ash this way and that in his hands, watching the curls of fine-grained wood rise ahead of his long, sure strokes.
Susannah lay down, laced her hands behind her head, and looked up at the stars wheeling slowly across the black sky.
At the edge of the campsite, Roland stood beyond the glow of the fire and listened as the voices of madness rose once more in his aching, confused mind.
There was a boy.
There was no boy.
Was.
Wasn't.
Was--
He closed his eyes, cupped his aching forehead in one cold hand, and wondered how long it would be until he simply snapped like an overwound bowstring.
Oh Jake, he thought. Where are you? Where are you?
And above the three of them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage.
II
KEY AND ROSE
1
FOR THREE WEEKS JOHN "Jake" Chambers fought bravely against the madness rising inside him. During that time he felt like the last man aboard a foundering ocean liner, working the bilge-pumps for dear life, trying to keep the ship afloat until the storm ended, the skies cleared, and help could arrive . . . help from somewhere. Help from anywhere. On May 31st, 1977, four days before school ended for the summer, he finally faced up to the fact that no help was going to come. It was time to give up; time to let the storm carry him away. The straw that broke the camel's back was his Final Essay in English Comp.
John Chambers, who was Jake to the three or four boys who were almost his friends (if his father had known this little factoid, he undoubtedly would have hit the roof), was finishing his first year at The Piper School. Although he was eleven and in the sixth grade, he was small for his age, and people meeting him for the first time often thought he was much younger. In fact, he had sometimes been mistaken for a girl until a year or so ago, when he had made such a fuss about having his hair cut short that his mother had finally relented and allowed it. With his father, of course, there had been no problem about the haircut. His father had just grinned his hard, stainless steel grin and said, The kid wants to look like a Marine, Laurie. Good for him.
To his father, he was never Jake and rarely John. To his father, he was usually just "the kid."
The Piper School, his father had explained to him the summer before (the Bicentennial Summer, that had been--all bunting and flags and New York Harbor filled with Tall Ships), was, quite simply, The Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy Your Age. The fact that Jake had been accepted there had nothing to do with money, Elmer Chambers explained . . . almost insisted. He had been savagely proud of this fact, although, even at ten, Jake had suspected it might not be a true fact, that it might really be a bunch of bullshit his father had turned into a fact so he could casually drop it into the conversation at lunch or over cocktails: My kid? Oh, he's going to Piper. Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy His Age. Money won't buy you into that school, you know; for Piper, it's brains or nothing.
Jake was perfectly aware that in the fierce furnace of Elmer Chambers's mind, the gross carbon of wish and opinion was often blasted into the hard diamonds which he called facts . . . or, in more informal circumstances, "factoids." His favorite phrase, spoken often and with reverence, was The fact is, and he used it every chance he got.
The fact is, money doesn't get anyone into The Piper School, his father had told him during that Bicentennial Summer, the summer of blue skies and bunting and Tall Ships, a summer which seemed golden in Jake's memory because he had not yet begun to lose his mind and all he had to worry about was whether or not he could cut the mustard at The Piper School, which sounded like a nest for newly hatched geniuses. The only thing that gets you into a place like Piper is what you've got up here. Elmer Chambers had reached over his desk and tapped the center of his son's forehead with a hard, nicotine-stained finger. Get me, kid?
Jake had nodded. It wasn't necessary to talk to his father, because is father treated everyone--including his wife--the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.
Good, his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day. We understand each other, then. You're going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn't. He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat. So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses, there's a trip to Disney World in it for you. That's something to shoot for, right, kiddo?
Jake had made his grades--A's in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw--the housekeeper--and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant anything. He wanted them to, but he had serious doubts.
Jake didn't think he would be going to Disney World this summer, A average or no A average.
He thought the nuthouse was a much better possibility.
As he walked in through the double doors of The Piper School at 8:45 on the morning of May 31st, a terrible vision came to him. He saw his father in his office at 70 Rockefeller Plaza, leaning over his desk with a Camel jutting from the corner of his mouth, talking to one of his underlings as blue smoke wreathed his head. All of New York was spread out behind and below his father, its thump and hustle silenced by two layers of Thermopane glass.
The fact is, money doesn't get anyone into Sunnyvale Sanitarium, his father was telling the underling in a tone of grim satisfaction. He reached out and tapped the underling's forehead. The only thing that gets you into a place like that is when something big-time goes wrong up here in the attic. That's what happened to the kid. But he's working his goddam buttsky off. Makes the best fucking baskets in the place, they tell me. And when they let him out--i
f they ever do--there's a trip in it for him. A trip to--
"--the way station," Jake muttered, then touched his forehead with a hand that wanted to tremble. The voices were coming back. The yelling, conflicting voices which were driving him mad.
You're dead, Jake. You were run over by a car and you're dead.
Don't be stupid! Look--see that poster? REMEMBER THE CLASS ONE PICNIC, it says. Do you think they have Class Picnics in the afterlife?
I don't know. But I know you were run over by a car.
No!
Yes. It happened on May 9th, at 8:25 A.M. You died less than a minute later.
No! No! No!
"John?"
He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette, his French teacher, was standing there, looking a little concerned. Behind him, the rest of the student body was streaming into the Common Room for the morning assembly. There was very little skylarking, and no yelling at all. Presumably these other students, like Jake himself, had been told by their parents how lucky they were to be attending Piper, where money didn't matter (although tuition was $22,000 a year), only your brains. Presumably many of them had been promised trips this summer if their grades were good enough. Presumably the parents of the lucky trip-winners would even go along in some cases. Presumably--
"John, are you okay?" Mr. Bissette asked.
"Sure," Jake said. "Fine. I overslept a little this morning. Not awake yet, I guess."
Mr. Bissette's face relaxed and he smiled. "Happens to the best of us."
Not to my dad. The master of The Kill never oversleeps.
"Are you ready for your French final?" Mr. Bissette asked. "Voulez-vous faire l'examen cet apres-midi?"
"I think so," Jake said. In truth he didn't know if he was ready for the exam or not. He couldn't even remember if he had studied for the French final or not. These days nothing seemed to matter much except for the voices in his head.
"I want to tell you again how much I enjoyed having you this year, John. I wanted to tell your folks, too, but they missed Parents' Night--"
