by Stephen King
Jake, tell Roland that if it’s June 19th of ’99 you’re interested in, you’re still okay. But the margin’s commencing to get a little thin.”
“I’ll tell him,” Jake said.
“And remind him that time sometimes slips over there.
Slips like an old transmission. That’s apt to continue for quite awhile, regardless of the Beam’s recovery. And once the 19th is gone…”
“It can never come again,” Jake said. “Not there. We know.”
He opened the door and slipped into the darkness of the proctor’s suite.
NINE
A single circle of stringent yellow light, thrown by the lamp on the bedtable, lay upon Eddie Dean’s face. It cast the shadow of his nose on his left cheek and turned his closed eyes into dark sockets. Susannah was kneeling on the floor beside him, holding both of his hands in both of hers and looking down at him. Her shadow ran long upon the wall. Roland sat on the other side of the bed, in deep shadow. The dying man’s long, muttered monologue had ceased, and his respiration had lost all semblance of regularity. He would snatch a deep breath, hold it, then let it out in a lengthy, whistling whoosh. His chest would lie still so long that Susannah would look up into his face, her eyes shining with anxiety until the next long, tearing breath had begun.
Jake sat down on the bed next to Roland, looked at Eddie, looked at Susannah, then looked hesitantly into the gunslinger’s face. In the gloom he could see nothing there except weariness.
“Ted says to tell you it’s almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya. Also that time could slip a notch.”
Roland nodded. ’Yet we’ll wait for this to be finished, I think. It won’t be much longer, and we owe him that.”
“How much longer?” Jake murmured.
“I don’t know. I thought he might be gone before you got here, even if you ran-”
“I did, once I got to the grassy part-”
“-but, as you see…”
“He fights hard,” Susannah said, and that this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. “My man fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say.”
TEN
And so he did. Five endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie’s eyes opened. “Sue…” He said,
“Su… sie-”
She leaned close, still holding his hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration fiercely narrowed. And with an effort Jake wouldn’t have believed possible, Eddie freed one of his hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed no sign. The smile that bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps even sensuous.
“Eddie! Welcome back!”
“Don’t bullshit… a bullshitter,” he whispered. “I’m goin, sweetheart, not comin.”
“That’s just plain sil-”
“Hush,” he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. “I… will… wait for you,” he said, forcing each word out with immense effort.
Jake saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body’s last message to the living world, and that was when the boy’s heart finally understood what his head had known for hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and scoured. When Roland took his hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to Eddie, it could happen to anybody. It could happen to him.
“Yes, Eddie. I know you’ll wait,” she said.
“In… “He pulled in another of those great, wretched, rasping breaths. His eyes were as brilliant as gemstones. “In the clearing.” Another breath. Hand holding her hair. Lamplight casting them both in its mystic yellow circle. “The one at the end of the path.”
“Yes, dear.” Her voice was calm now, but a tear fell on Eddie’s cheek and ran slowly down to the line of jaw. “I hear you very well. Wait for me and I’ll find you and we’ll go together. I’ll be walking then, on my own legs.”
Eddie smiled at her, then turned his eyes to Jake.
“Jake… to me.”
No, Jake thought, panicked, no, I can’t, I can’t.
But he was already leaning close, into that smell of the end. He could see the fine line of grit just below Eddie’s hairline turning to paste as more tiny droplets of sweat sprang up.
“Wait for me, too,” Jake said through numb lips. “Okay,
Eddie? We’ll all go on together. We’ll be ka-tet, just like we were.” He tried to smile and couldn’t. His heart hurt too much for smiling. He wondered if it might not explode in his chest, the way stones sometimes exploded in a hot fire. He had learned that little fact from his friend Benny Slightman. Benny’s death had been bad, but this was a thousand times worse. A million.
Eddie was shaking his head. “Not… so fast, buddy.” He drew in another breath and then grimaced, as if the air had grown quills only he could feel. He whispered then-not from weakness, Jake thought later, but because this was just between them. “Watch… for Mordred. Watch… Dandelo.”
“Dandelion? Eddie, I don’t-”
“Dandelo.” Eyes widening. Enormous effort. “Protect… your… dinh… from Mordred. From Dandelo. You… Oy. Your job.” His eyes cut toward Roland, then back to Jake.
“Shhh.” Then: “Protect…”
“I… I will. We will.”
Eddie nodded a little, then looked at Roland. Jake moved aside and the gunslinger leaned in for Eddie’s word to him.
ELEVEN
Never, ever, had Roland seen an eye so bright, not even on Jericho Hill, when Cuthbert had bade him a laughing goodbye.
Eddie smiled. “We had… some times.”
Roland nodded again.
“You… you…” But this Eddie couldn’t finish. He raised one hand and made a weak twirling motion.
“I danced,” Roland said, nodding. “Danced the commala.”
Yes, Eddie mouthed, then drew in another of those whooping, painful breaths. It was the last.
“Thank you for my second chance,” he said. “Thank you…
Father.”
That was all. Eddie’s eyes still looked at him, and they were still aware, but he had no breath to replace the one expended on that final word, that father. The lamplight gleamed on the hairs of his bare arms, turning them to gold. The thunder murmured.
Then Eddie’s eyes closed and he laid his head to one side. His work was finished. He had left the path, stepped into the clearing. They sat around him a-circle, but ka-tet no more.
TWELVE
And so, thirty minutes later.
Roland, Jake, Ted, and Sheemie sat on a bench in the middle of the Mall. Dani Rostov and the bankerly-looking fellow were nearby. Susannah was in the bedroom of the proctor’s suite, washing her husband’s body for burial. They could hear her from where they were sitting. She was singing. All the songs seemed to be ones they’d heard Eddie singing along the trail.
One was “Born to Run.” Another was “The Rice Song,” from Calla Bryn Sturgis.
“We have to go, and right away,” Roland said. His hand had gone to his hip and was rubbing, rubbing. Jake had seen him take a botde of aspirin (gotten God knew where) from his purse and dry-swallow three. “Sheemie, will you send us on?”
Sheemie nodded. He had limped to the bench, leaning on Dinky for support, and still none of them had had a chance to look at the wound on his foot. His limp seemed so minor compared to their other concerns; surely if Sheemie Ruiz were to die this night it would be as a result of opening a makeshift door between Thunder-side and America. Another strenuous act of teleportation might be lethal to him-what was a sore foot compared to that?
“I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll try my very hardest, so I will.”
“Those who helped us look into New York will help us do this,” Ted said.
It was Ted who had figured out how to determine the current when o
n America-side of the Keystone World. He, Dinky,
Fred Worthington (the bankerly-looking man), and Dani Rostov had all been to New York, and were all able to summon up clear mental images of Times Square: the lights, the crowds, the movie marquees… and, most important, the giant news-ticker which broadcast the events of the day to the crowds below, making a complete circuit of Broadway and Forty-eighth Street every thirty seconds or so. The hole had opened long enough to inform them that UN forensics experts were examining supposed mass graves in Kosovo, that Vice President Gore had spent the day in New York City campaigning for President, that Roger Clemens had struck out thirteen Texas Rangers but the Yankees had still lost the night before.
With the help of the rest, Sheemie could have held the hole open a good while longer (the others had been staring into the brilliance of that bustling New York night with a kind of hungry amazement, not Breaking now but Opening, Seeing), only there turned out to be no need for that. Following the baseball score, the date and time had gone speeding past them in brilliant yellow-green letters a story high: JUNE 18,1999 9:19 PM.
Jake opened his mouth to ask how they could be sure they had been looking into Keystone World, the one where Stephen King had less than a day to live, and then shut it again. The answer was in the time, stupid, as the answer always was: the numbers comprising 9:19 also added up to nineteen.
THIRTEEN
“And how long ago was it that you saw this?” Roland asked.
Dinky calculated. “Had to’ve been five hours, at least. Based on when the change-of-shifts horn blew and the sun went out for the night.”
Which should make it two-thirty in the morning right now on the other side, Jake calculated, counting the hours on his fingers.
Thinking was hard now, even simple addition slowed by constant thoughts of Eddie, but he found he could do it if he really tried. Only you can’t depend on its only being five hours, because time goes faster on America-side. That may change now that the Breakers have quit beating up on the Beam-it may equalize-but probably not yet. Right now it’s probably still running fast.
And it might slip.
One minute Stephen King could be sitting in front of his typewriter in his office on the morning of June 19th, fine as paint, and the next… boom! Lying in a nearby funeral parlor that evening, eight or twelve hours gone by in a flash, his grieving family sitting in their own circle of lamplight and trying to decide what kind of service King would’ve wanted, always assuming that information wasn’t in his will; maybe even trying to decide where he’d be buried. And die Dark Tower? Stephen King’s version of the Dark Tower? Or Gan’s version, or the Prims version? Lost forever, all of them. And that sound you hear? Why, that must be the Crimson King, laughing and laughing and laughing from somewhere deep in the Discordia. And maybe Mordred the Spider-Boy, laughing along with him.
For the first time since Eddie’s death, something besides grief came to the forefront of Jake’s mind. It was a faint ticking sound, like the one the Sneetches had made when Roland and Eddie programmed them. Just before giving them to Haylis to plant, this had been. It was the sound of time, and time was not their friend.
“He’s right,” Jake said. “We have to go while we can still do something.”
Ted: “Will Susannah-”
“No,” Roland said. “Susannah will stay here, and you’ll help her bury Eddie. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Ted said. “Of course, if that’s how you’d have it.”
“If we’re not back in…” Roland calculated, one eye squinted shut, the other looking off into the darkness. “If we’re not back by this time on the night after next, assume that we’ve come back to End-World at Fedic.” Yes, assumeFedic, Jake thought. Of course. Because what good would it do to make the other, even more logical assumption, that we’re either dead or lost between the worlds, todashforever’?
“Do’ee ken Fedic?” Roland was asking.
“South of here, isn’t it?” asked Worthington. He had wandered over with Dani, the pre-teen girl. “Or what was south?
Trampas and a few of the other can-toi used to talk of it as though it were haunted.”
“It’s haunted, all right,” Roland said grimly. “Can you put Susannah on a train to Fedic in the event that we’re not able to come back here? I know that at least some trains must still run, because of-”
“The Greencloaks?” Dinky said, nodding. “Or the Wolves, as you think of them. All the D-line trains still run. They’re automated.”
“Are they monos? Do they talk?” Jake asked. He was thinking of Blaine.
Dinky and Ted exchanged a doubtful look, then Dinky returned his attention to Jake and shrugged. “How would we know? I probably know more about D-cups than D-lines, and I think that’s true of everyone here. The Breakers, at least. I suppose some of the guards might know something more. Or that guy.” He jerked a thumb at Tassa, who was still sitting on the stoop of Warden’s House, head in hands.
“In any case, we’ll tell Susannah to be careful,” Roland murmured to Jake. Jake nodded. He supposed that was the best they could do, but he had another question. He made a mental note to ask either Ted or Dinky, if he got a chance to do so without being overheard by Roland. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Susannah behind-every instinct of his heart cried out against it-but he knew she would refuse to leave Eddie unburied, and Roland knew it, too. They could make her come, but only by binding and gagging her, and that would only make things worse than they were already.
“It might be,” Ted said, “that a few Breakers would be interested in taking the train-trip south with Susannah.”
Dani nodded. “We’re not exactly loved around here for helping you out,” she said. “Ted and Dinky are getting it the worst, but somebody spit at me half an hour ago, while I was in my room, getting this.” She held up a battered-looking and clearly much-loved Pooh Bear. “I don’t think diey’ll do anything while you guys are around, but after you go… “She shrugged.
“Man, I don’t get that,” Jake said. “They’re free.’”
“Free to do what?” Dinky asked. “Think about it. Most of them were misfits on America-side. Fifth wheels. Over here we were VIPs, and we got the best of everything. Now all that’s gone. When you think about it that way, is it so hard to understand?”
“Yes,” Jake said bluntly. He supposed he didn’t want to understand.
“They lost something else, too,” Ted told them quietly.
“There’s a novel by Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451. ’It was a pleasure to burn’ is that novel’s first line. Well, it was a pleasure to Break, as well.”
Dinky was nodding. So were Worthington and Dani Rostov.
Even Sheemie was nodding his head.
FOURTEEN
Eddie lay in that same circle of light, but now his face was clean and the top sheet of the proctor’s bed had been folded neatly down to his midsection. Susannah had dressed him in a clean white shirt she’d found somewhere (in the proctor’s closet was Jake’s guess), and she must have found a razor, too, because his cheeks were smooth. Jake tried to imagine her sitting here and shaving the face of her dead husband-singing “Commala-come-come, the rice has just begun” as she did it-and at first he couldn’t. Then, all at once, the image came to him, and it was so powerful that he had to struggle once again to keep from bursting into sobs.
She listened quietly as Roland spoke to her, sitting on the side of the bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast. To the gunslinger she looked like a shy virgin receiving a marriage proposal.
When he had finished, she said nothing.
“Do you understand what I’ve told you, Susannah?”
“Yes,” she said, still without looking up. “I’m to bury my man.
Ted and Dinky will help me, if only to keep their friends-” she gave this word a bitterly sarcastic litde twist that actually encouraged Roland a bit; she was in there after all, it seemed “-from taking him away from me and lynching his body from a
sour apple tree.”
“And then?”
“Either you’ll find a way to come back here and we’ll return to Fedic together, or Ted and Dinky will put me on the train and I’ll go there alone.”
Jake didn’t just hate the cold disconnection in her voice; it terrified him, as well. ’You know why we have to go back to the other side, don’t you?” he asked anxiously. “I mean, you knoiu, don’t you?”
“To save the writer while there’s still time.” She had picked up one of Eddie’s hands, and Jake noted with fascination that his nails were perfectly clean. What had she used to get die dirt out from beneath them, he wondered-had the proctor had one of those little nail-care gadgets, like the one his father always kept on a keychain in his pocket? “Sheemie says we’ve saved the Beam of Bear and Turtle. We think we’ve saved the rose. But there’s at least one more job to do. The writer. The lazybones writer.” Now she did look up, and her eyes flashed.
Jake suddenly thought it might be good that Susannah wouldn’t be with them when-if-they met sai Stephen King.
“You bettah save him,” she said. Both Roland and Jake could hear old sneak-thief Detta creeping into her voice. “After what’s happened today, youjust bettah. And this time, Roland, you tell him not to stop with his writin. Not come hell, high water, cancer, or gangrene of the dick. Never mind worryin about the Pulitzer Prize, neither. You tell him to go on and be donewith his motherfuckin story.”
“I will pass the message on,” Roland said.
She nodded.
“You’ll come to us when this job is finished,” Roland said, and his voice rose just slightly on the last word, almost turning it into a question. ’You’ll come with us and finish the final job, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Not because I want to-all the spit and git is out of me-but because it wanted me to.” Gently, very gently, she put Eddie’s hand back on his chest with the other one. Then she pointed a finger at Roland. The tip trembled minutely. “Just don’t start up with any of that we are ka-tet, we are one from many crap. Because those days are gone. Ain’t they?”
