by Stephen King
“Aye, Will Dearborn that was, right at me, so he did, and said
“Why must you hurt me, when I love you so? When I can do nothing else nor want to, for love made me and fed me and-’”
“’And kept me in better days,’” Eddie murmured. A tear fell from one of his eyes and made a dark spot on the floor of the cave.
“’-and kept me in better days? Why will you cut me, and disfigure my face, and fill me with woe? I have only loved you for your beauty as you once loved me for mine in the days before the world moved on. Now you scar me with nails and put burning drops of quicksilver in my nose; you have set the animals on me, so you have, and they have eaten of my softest parts.
Around me the can-toi gather and there’s no peace from their laughter. Yet still I love you and would serve you and even bring the magic again, if you would allow me, for that is how my heart was cast when I rose from the Prim. And once I was strong as well as beautiful, but now my strength is almost gone.’”
“You cried,” Susannah said, and Jake thought: Of course he did. He was crying himself. So was Ted; so was Dinky Earnshaw.
Only Roland was dry-eyed, and the gunslinger was pale, so pale.
“He wept,” said Sheemie (tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told his dream), “and I did, too, for I could see that he had been fair as daylight. He said, ’If the torture were to stop now, I might still recover-if never my looks, then at least my strength-’”
“"My kes,’” Jake said, and although he’d never heard the word before he pronounced it correcdy, almost as if it were kiss.
“-and my kes. But another week… or maybe five days… or even three… and it will be too late. Even if die torture stops, I’ll die. And you’ll die too, for when love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.” Then the boy turned and went out.
The batwing door made its same sound. Skree-eek.”
He looked at Jake, now, and smiled like one who has just awakened. “I can’t answer your question, sai.” He knocked a fist on his forehead. “Don’t have much in the way of brains up here, me-only cobwebbies. Cordelia Delgado said so, and I reckon she was right.”
Jake made no reply. He was dazed. He had dreamed about the same disfigured boy, but not in any saloon; it had been in Gage Park, the one where they’d seen Charlie the Choo-Choo.
Last night. Had to have been. He hadn’t remembered until now, would probably never have remembered if Sheemie hadn’t told his own dream. And had Roland, Eddie, and Susannah also had a version of the same dream? Yes. He could see it on their faces, just as he could see that Ted and Dinky looked moved but otherwise bewildered.
Roland stood up with a wince, clamped his hand briefly to his hip, then said, “Thankee-sai, Sheemie, you’ve helped us greatly.”
Sheemie smiled uncertainly. “How did I do that?”
“Never mind, my dear.” Roland turned his attention to Ted. “My friends and I are going to step outside briefly. We need to speak an-tet.”
“Of course,” Ted said. He shook his head as if to clear it.
“Do my peace of mind a favor and keep it short,” Dinky said. “We’re probably still all right, but I don’t want to push our luck.”
“WilL you need him to jump you back inside?” Eddie asked, nodding; to Sheemie. This was in the nature of a rhetorical question; how else would the three of them get back?
“Well, yeah, but…” Dinky began.
“Then you’ll be pushing your luck plenty.” That said, Eddie,
Susannah, and Jake followed Roland out of the cave. Oy stayed behind, sitting with his new friend, Haylis of Chayven. Something about that troubled Jake. It wasn’t a feeling of jealousy but rather one of dread. As if he were seeing an omen someone wiser than himself-one of the Manni-folk, perhaps-could interpret. But would he want to know?
Perhaps not.
SIX
“I didn’t remember my dream until he told his,” Susannah said, “and if he hadn’t told his, I probably never would have remembered.”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“But I remember it clearly enough now,” she went on. “I was in a subway station and the boy came down the stairs-”
Jake said, “I was in Gage Park-”
“And I was at the Markey Avenue playground, where me and Henry used to play one-on-one,” Eddie said. “In my dream, the kid with the bloody face was wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT-”
“-IN MID-WORLD,” Jake finished, and Eddie gave him a startled look.
Jake barely noticed; his thoughts had turned in another direction. “I wonder if Stephen King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot rise.”
This was a question none of them could answer.
“Roland?” Eddie asked. “Where were you in your dream?”
“The Travellers’ Rest, where else? Wasn’t I there with Sheemie, once upon a time?” With my friends, now long gone, he could have added, but did not. “I was sitting at the table Eldred Jonas used to favor, playing one-hand Watch Me.”
Susannah said quiedy, “The boy in die dream was the Beam, wasn’t he?”
As Roland nodded, Jake realized that Sheemie had told them which task came first, after all. Had told them beyond all doubt.
“Do any of you have a question?” Roland asked.
One by one, his companions shook their heads.
“We are ka-tet,” Roland said, and in unison they answered:
“We are one from many.”
Roland tarried a moment longer, looking at them-more than looking, seeming to savor their faces-and then he led them back inside…
“Sheemie,” he said.
“Yes, sai! Yes, Roland, Will Dearborn that was!”
“We’re going to save the boy you told us about. We’re going to make the bad folk stop hurting him.”
Sheemie smiled, but it was a puzzled smile. He didn’t remember the boy in his dream, not anymore. “Good, sai, that’s good!”
Roland turned his attention to Ted. “Once Sheemie gets you back this time, put him to bed. Or, if that would attract the wrong sort of attention, just make sure he takes it easy.”
“We can write him down for the sniffles and keep him out of The Study,” Ted agreed. “There are a lot of colds Thunderside.
But you folks need to understand that there are no guarantees.
He could get us back inside this time, and then-” He snapped his fingers in the air.
Laughing, Sheemie imitated him, only snapping both sets of fingers. Susannah looked away, sick to her stomach.
“I know that,” Roland said, and although his tone did not change very much, each member of his ka-tet knew it was a good thing this palaver was almost over. Roland had reached the rim of his patience. “Keep him quiet even if he’s well and feeling fine. We won’t need him for what I have in mind, and thanks to the weapons you’ve left us.”
“They’re good weapons,” Ted agreed, “but are they good enough to wipe out sixty men, can-toi, and taheen?”
“Will the two of you stand with us, once the fight begins?”
Roland asked.
“With the greatest pleasure,” Dinky said, baring his teeth in a remarkably nasty grin.
“Yes,” Ted said. “And it might be that I have another weapon. Did you listen to the tapes I left you?”
“Yes,” Jake replied.
“So you know the story about the guy who stole my wallet.”
This time they all nodded.
“What about that young woman?” Susannah asked. “One tough cookie, you said. What about Tanya and her boyfriend? Or her husband, if that’s what he is?”
Ted and Dinky exchanged a brief, doubtful look, then shook their heads simultaneously.
“Once, maybe,” Ted said. “Not now. Now she’s married. All she wants to do is cuddle with her fella.”
&
nbsp; “And Break,” Dinky added.
“But don’t they understand…” She found she couldn’t finish.
She was haunted not so much by the remnants of her own dream as by Sheemie’s. Now you scar me with nails, the dream-boy had told Sheemie. The dream-boy who had once been fair.
“They don’t want to understand,” Ted told her kindly. He caught a glimpse of Eddie’s dark face and shook his head.
“But I won’t let you hate them for it. You-we-may have to kill some of them, but I won’t let you hate them. They did not put understanding away from them out of greed or fear, but from despair.”
“And because to Break is divine,” Dinky said. He was also looking at Eddie. “The way the half an hour after you shoot up can be divine. If you know what I’m talking about.”
Eddie sighed, stuck his hands in his pockets, said nothing.
Sheemie surprised them all by picking up one of the Coyote machine-pistols and swinging it in an arc. Had it been loaded, the great quest for the Dark Tower would have ended right there. “I’ll fight, too!” he cried. “Pow, pow, pow! Bam-bam-bam-ba-
Eddie and Susannah ducked; Jake threw himself instinctively in front of Oy; Ted and Dinky raised their hands in front of their faces, as if that could possibly have saved them from a burst of a hundred high-caliber, steeljacketed slugs. Roland plucked the machine-pistol calmly from Sheemie’s hands.
“Your time to help will come,” he said, “but after this first battle’s fought and won. Do you see Jake’s bumbler, Sheemie?”
“Aye, he’s with the Rod.”
“He talks. See if you can get him to talk to you.”
Sheemie obediently went to where Chucky/Haylis was still stroking Oy’s head, dropped to one knee, and commenced trying to get Oy to say his name. The bumbler did almost at once, and with remarkable clarity. Sheemie laughed, and Haylis joined in. They sounded like a couple of kids from the Calla.
The roont kind, perhaps.
Roland, meanwhile, turned to Dinky and Ted, his lips little more than a white line in his stern face.
SEVEN
“He’s to be kept out of it, once the shooting starts.” The gunslinger mimed turning a key in a lock. “If we lose, what happens to him later on won’t matter. If we win, we’ll need him at least one more time. Probably twice.”
“To go where?” Dinky asked.
“Keystone World America,” Eddie said. “A small town in western Maine called Lovell. As early in June of 1999 as one-way time allows.”
“Sending me to Connecticut appears to have inaugurated Sheemie’s seizures,” Ted said in a low voice. “You know that sending you back America-side is apt to make him worse, don’t you? Or kill him?” He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. Just askin, gents.
“We know,” Roland said, “and when the time comes, I’ll make the risk clear and ask him if-”
“Oh man, you can stick that one where the sun don’t shine,”
Dinky said, and Eddie was reminded so strongly of himself-the way he’d been during his first few hours on the shore of the Western Sea, confused, pissed off, and jonesing for heroin-that he felt a moment of deja vu. “If you told him you wanted him to set himself on fire, the only thing he’d want to know would be if you had a match. He thinks you’re Christ on a cracker.”
Susannah waited, with a mixture of dread and almost prurient interest, for Roland’s response. There was none. Roland only stared at Dinky, his thumbs hooked into his gunbelt.
“Surely you realize that a dead man can’t bring you back from America-side,” Ted said in a more reasonable tone.
“We’ll jump that fence when and if we come to it,” Roland said. “In the meantime, we’ve got several other fences to get over.”
“I’m glad we’re taking on the Devar-Toi first, whatever the risk,” Susannah said. “What’s going on down there is an abomination.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dinky drawled, and pushed up an imaginary hat. “Ah reckon that’s the word.”
The tension in die cave eased. Behind them, Sheemie was telling Oy to roll over, and Oy was doing so willingly enough.
The Rod had a big, sloppy smile on his face. Susannah wondered when Haylis of Chayven had last had occasion to use his smile, which was childishly charming.
She thought of asking Ted if there was any way of telling what day it was in America right now, then decided not to bother. If Stephen King was dead, diey’d know; Roland had said so, and she had no doubt he was right. For now the writer was fine, happily frittering away his time and valuable imagination on some meaningless project while the world he’d been born to imagine continued to gather dust in his head. If Roland was pissed at him, it was really no wonder. She was a little pissed at him herself.
“What’s your plan, Roland?” Ted asked.
“It relies on two assumptions: that we can surprise them and then stampede them. I don’t think they expect to be interrupted in these last days; from Pimli Prentiss down to the lowliest hume guard outside the fence, they have no reason to believe they’ll be bothered in their work, certainly not attacked. If my assumptions are correct, we’ll succeed. If we fail, at least we won’t live long enough to see the Beams break and the Tower fall.”
Roland found the crude map of die Algul and put it on the floor of the cave. They all gathered around it.
“These railroad sidetracks,” he said, indicating the hashmarks labeled 10. “Some of the dead engines and traincars on them stand widiin twenty yards of the south fence, it looks like through the binoculars. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Dinky said, and pointed to the center of die nearest line. “Might as well call it south, anyway-it’s as good a word as any. There’s a boxcar on this track that’s real close to the fence.
Only ten yards or so. It says soo LINE on the side.”
Ted was nodding.
“Good cover,” Roland said. “Excellent cover.” Now he pointed to the area beyond the north end of the compound.
“And here, all sorts of sheds.”
“There used to be supplies in them,” Ted said, “but now most are empty, I think. For awhile a gang of Rods slept there, but six or eight months ago, Pimli and the Wease kicked them out.”
“But more cover, empty or full,” Roland said. “Is the ground behind and around them clear of obstacles and pretty much smooth? Smooth enough for that thing to go back and forth?”
He cocked a thumb at Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.
Ted and Dinky exchanged a glance. “Definitely,” Ted said.
Susannah waited to see if Eddie would protest, even before he knew what Roland had in mind. He didn’t. Good. She was already thinking about what weapons she’d want. What guns.
Roland sat quiet for a moment or two, gazing at the map, almost seeming to commune with it. When Ted offered him a cigarette, the gunslinger took it. Then he began to talk. Twice he drew on the side of a weapons crate with a piece of chalk.
Twice more he drew arrows on the map, one pointing to what they were calling north, one to the south. Ted asked a question;
Dinky asked another. Behind them, Sheemie and Haylis played with Oy like a couple of children. The bumbler mimicked their laughter with eerie accuracy.
When Roland had finished, Ted Brautigan said: ’You mean to spill an almighty lot of blood.”
“Indeed I do. As much as I can.”
“Risky for the lady,” Dink remarked, looking first at her and then at her husband.
Susannah said nothing. Neither did Eddie. He recognized the risk. He also understood why Roland would want Suze north of the compound. The Cruisin Trike would give her mobility, and they’d need it. As for risk, they were six planning to take on sixty. Or more. Of course there would be risk, and of course there would be blood.
Blood and fire.
“I may be able to rig a couple of other guns,” Susannah said. Her eyes had taken on that special Detta Walker gleam.
“Radio-controlled, like a toy airplane. I dunno. But I’ll move, a
ll right. I’m goan speed around like grease on a hot griddle.”
“Can this work?” Dinky asked bluntly.
Roland’s lips parted in a humorless grin. “It a«7/work.”
“How can you say that?” Ted asked.
Eddie recalled Roland’s reasoning before their call to John Cullum and could have answered that question, but answers were for their ka-tet’s dinh to give-if he would-and so he left this one to Roland.
“Because it has to,” the gunslinger said. “I see no other way.”
Chapter XI:
THE ATTACK ON ALGUL SIENTO
ONE
It was a day later and not long before the horn signaled the morning change of shift. The music would soon start, the sun would come on, and the Breaker night-crew would exit The Study stage left while the Breaker day-crew entered stage right.
Everything was as it should be, yet Pimli Prentiss had slept less than an hour the previous night and even that brief time had been haunted by sour and chaotic dreams. Finally, around four
(what his bedside clock in fact claimed was four, but who knew anymore, and what did it matter anyway, this close to the end),
he’d gotten up and sat in his office chair, looking out at the darkened Mall, deserted at this hour save for one lone and poindess robot who’d taken it into its head to patrol, waving its six pincertipped arms aimlessly at the sky. The robots that still ran grew wonkier by the day, but pulling their batteries could be dangerous, for some were booby-trapped and would explode it you tried it. There was nothing you could do but put up with their antics and keep reminding yourself that all would be over soon, praise Jesus and God the Fauier Almighty. At some point the former Paul Prentiss opened the desk drawer above the kneehole, pulled out the.40 Peacemaker Colt inside, and held it in his lap.
It was the one with which the previous Master, Humma, had executed the rapist Cameron. Pimli hadn’t had to execute anyone in his time and was glad of it, but holding the pistol in his lap, feeling its grave weight, always offered a certain comfort.
