by Stephen King
She punched the clutch, downshifted to Second like a NASCAR driver with the checkered flag in view, then turned hard left, hauling on the wheel with both hands. Chip McAvoy’s pickup truck teetered but did not roll. She saw the twinkle of sun on metal as a vehicle coming the other way reached the top of the hill King was climbing. She heard the man sitting by the door shout, “Pull in behind him!”
She did as he told her, even though she could now see that the oncoming vehicle was off the road and thus apt to broadside them. Not to mention crushing Stephen King in a metal sandwich between them.
The door popped open and the one named Roland halfrolled, halfjumped out of the truck.
After that, things happened very, very fast.
Chapter II:
VES’-KA GAN
ONE
What happened was lethally simple: Roland’s bad hip betrayed him. He went to his knees with a cry of mingled rage, pain, and dismay. Then the sunlight was blotted out as Jake leaped over him without so much as breaking stride. Oy was barking crazily from the cab of the truck: “Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake!”
“Jake, no!"Roland shouted. He saw it all with a terrible clarity.
The boy seized the writer around the waist as the blue vehicle-neither a truck nor a car but seemingly a cross between the two-bore down upon them in a roar of dissonant music.
Jake turned King to the left, shielding him widi his body, and so it was Jake the vehicle struck. Behind the gunslinger, who was now on his knees with his bleeding hands buried in the dirt, the woman from the store screamed.
“JAKE, NO!"Roland bellowed again, but it was too late. The boy he thought of as his son disappeared beneath the blue vehicle. The gunslinger saw one small upraised hand-would never forget it-and then that was gone, too. King, struck first by Jake and then by the weight of the van behind Jake, was thrown to the edge of the little grove of trees, ten feet from the point of impact. He landed on his right side, hitting his head on a stone hard enough to send the cap flying from his head.
Then he rolled over, perhaps intending to try for his feet. Or perhaps intending nothing at all; his eyes were shocked zeroes.
The driver hauled on his vehicle’s steering wheel and it slipped past on Roland’s left, missing him by inches, merely throwing dust into his face instead of running him down. By then it was slowing, the driver perhaps applying the machine’s brake now that it was too late. The side squalled across the hood of the pickup truck, slowing the van further, but it was not done doing damage even so. Before coming to a complete stop it struck King again, this time as he lay on the ground.
Roland heard the snap of a breaking bone. It was followed by the writer’s cry of pain. And now Roland knew for sure about the pain in his own hip, didn’t he? It had never been dry twist at all.
He scrambled to his feet, only peripherally aware that his pain was entirely gone. He looked at Stephen King’s unnaturally twisted body beneath the left front wheel of the blue vehicle and thought Good! with unthinking savagery. Good! If someone has to die here, let it be you! To hell with Gan ’s navel, to hell with the stories that come out of it, to hell with the Tower, let it be you and not my boy!
The bumbler raced past Roland to where Jake lay on his back at the rear of the van with blue exhaust blowing into his open eyes. Oy did not hesitate; he seized the Oriza pouch that was still slung over Jake’s shoulder and used it to pull the boy away from the van, doing it inch by inch, his short strong legs digging up puffs of dust. Blood was pouring from Jake’s ears and the corners of his mouth. The heels of his shor’boots left a double line of tracks in the dirt and crisp brown pine needles.
Roland staggered to Jake and fell on his knees beside him.
His first thought was that Jake was all right after all. The boy’s limbs were straight, thank all the gods, and the mark running across the bridge of his nose and down one beardless cheek was oil flecked with rust, not blood as Roland had first assumed.
There was blood coming out of his ears, yes, and his mouth, too, but die latter stream might only be flowing from a cut in the lining of his cheek, or-
“Go and see to the writer,” Jake said. His voice was calm, not at all constricted by pain. They might have been sitting around a little cookfire after a day on the trail, waiting for what Eddie liked to call vittles… or, if he happened to be feeling particularly humorous (as he often was), “wittles.”
“The writer can wait,” Roland said curdy, thinking: I’ve been given a miracle. One made by the combination of a boy’s yielding, not-quite-finished body, and the soft earth that gave beneath him when that bastard’s truckomobile ran over him.
“No,” Jake said. “He can’t.” And when he moved, trying to sit up, his shirt pulled a little tighter against the top half of his body and Roland saw the dreadful concavity of the boy’s chest. More blood poured from Jake’s mouth, and when he tried to speak again he began to cough, instead. Roland’s heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.
Oy voiced a moaning cry, Jake’s name expressed in a halfhowl that made Roland’s arms burst out in gooseflesh.
“Don’t try to talk,” Roland said. “Something may be sprung inside of you. A rib, mayhap two.”
Jake turned his head to the side. He spat out a mouthful of blood-some of it ran down his cheek like chewing tobacco-and took a hold on Roland’s wrist. His grip was strong; so was his voice, each word clear.
“Everything’s sprung. This is dying-I know because I’ve done it before.” What he said next was what Roland had been thinking just before they started out from Cara Laughs: “If ka will say so, let it be so. See to the man we came to save!”
It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy’s eyes and voice. It was done, now, the Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except, perhaps, for King. The man they had come to save. How much of their fate had danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers? All? Some? This?
Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he lay pinned beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King hadn’t been driving the van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be doing, he never would have been here when the fool came calling, and Jake’s chest wouldn’t have that terrible sunken look. It was too much, coming so soon after Eddie had been bushwhacked.
And yet-
“Don’t move,” he said, getting up. “Oy, don’t lethim move.”
“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake’s shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses.
Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was always for keeps.
Roland turned to where the writer lay.
TWO
When Bryan Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both, were barking and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out some new and utterly hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would split, not from the shock of what had just happened but from pure racket. She saw the man’s revolver lying on the ground and picked it up. The small part of her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by the weight of the tiling.
Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars gone, she could hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling… well, one howling whateveriit-was.
“Back your van off the guy you hit,” she said. “Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I’ll blow your jackass head off.”
Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot, bewildered eyes.
“What kid?” he asked.
THREE
When the van’s front wheel rolled slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower
body was twisted unnaturally to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side. His thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock against which it had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in blood. He looked worse than Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn’t kill him, he’d probably live through this. Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller body. f
“You again,” King said in a low voice.
“You remember me.”
“Yes. Now.” King licked his lips. “Thirsty.”
Roland had nothing to drink, and wouldn’t have given more than enough to wet King’s lips even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting could lead to choking. “Sorry,” he said.
“No. You’re not.” He licked his lips again. “Jake?”
“Over there, on the ground. You know him?”
King tried to smile. “Wrote him. Where’s the one that was with you before? Where’s Eddie?”
“Dead,” Roland said. “In the Devar-Toi.”
“King frowned. “Devar…? I don’t know that.”
“No. That’s why we’re here. Why we had to come here.
One of my friends is dead, another may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one lazy, fearful man stopped doing the job for which ka intended him.”
No traffic on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the chirping birds, the world was silent.
They might have been frozen in time. Perhaps we are, Roland thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might be possible.
Anything might be possible.
“I lost the Beam,” King said from where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold.
Roland reached under King and helped him to sit up. The writer cried ovxt in pain as the swollen ball of his right hip grated in the shattered, compressed remains of its socket, but he did not protest. Roland pointed into the sky. Fat white fairweather clouds-los dngeles, the cowpokes of Mejis had called them-hung motionless in the blue, except for those directly above them. There they hied rapidly across the sky, as if blown by a narrow wind.
“There!” Roland whispered furiously into the writer’s scraped, dirt-clogged ear. “Directly above you! All around you!
Does thee not feel it? Does thee not see it?”
“Yes,” King said. “I see it now.”
“Aye, and ’twas always there. You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away. My friend had to save you for you to see it again.”
Roland’s left hand fumbled in his belt and brought out a shell. At first his fingers wouldn’t do their old, dexterous trick; they were trembling too badly. He was only able to still them by reminding himself that the longer it took him to do this, the greater the chance that they would be interrupted, or that Jake would die while he was busy with this miserable excuse for a man.
He looked up and saw the woman holding his gun on the driver of the van. That was good. She was good: why hadn’t Gan given the story of the Tower to someone like her? In any case, his instinct to keep her with them had been true. Even the infernal racket of dogs and bumbler had quieted. Oy was licking the dirt and oil from Jake’s face, while in the van, Pistol and Bullet were gobbling up the hamburger, this time without interference from their master.
Roland turned back to King, and the shell did its old sure dance across the backs of his fingers. King went under almost immediately, as most people did when they’d been hypnotized before. His eyes were still open, but now they seemed to look through the gunslinger, beyond him.
Roland’s heart screamed at him to get through this as quickly as he could, but his head knew better. You must not botch it. Not unless you want to render Jake’s sacrifice worthless.
The woman was looking at him, and so was the van’s driver as he sat in the open door of his vehicle. Sai Tassenbaum was fighting it, Roland saw, but Bryan Smith had followed King into the land of sleep. This didn’t surprise the gunslinger much. If the man had the slightest inkling of what he’d done here, he’d be apt to seize any opportunity for escape. Even a temporary one.
The gunslinger turned his attention back to the man who was, he supposed, his biographer. He started just as he had before. Days ago in his own life. Over two decades ago in the writer’s.
“Stephen King, do you see me?”
“Gunslinger, I see you very well.”
“When did you last see me?”
“When we lived in Bridgton. When my tet was young. When I was just learning how to write.” A pause, and then he gave what Roland supposed was, for him, the most important way of marking time, a thing that was different for every man: “When I was still drinking.”
“Are you deep asleep now?”
“Deep.”
“Are you under the pain?”
“Under it, yes. I thank you.”
The billy-bumbler howled again. Roland looked around, terribly afraid of what it might signify. The woman had gone to Jake and was kneeling beside him. Roland was relieved to see Jake put an arm around her neck and draw her head down so he could speak into her ear. If he was strong enough to do that-
Stop it! You saw the changed shape of him under his shirt. You can’t afford to waste time on hope.
There was a cruel paradox here: because he loved Jake, he had to leave the business of Jake’s dying to Oy and a woman they had met less than an hour ago.
Never mind. His business now was with King. Should Jake pass into the clearing while his back was turned… ifka will say so, let it be so.
Roland summoned his will and concentration. He focused them to a burning point, then turned his attention to the writer once more. “Are you Gan?” he asked abruptly, not knowing why this question came to him-only that it was the right question.
“No,” King said at once. Blood ran into his mouth from the cut on his head and he spat it out, never blinking. “Once I thought I was, but that was just the booze. And pride, I suppose.
No writer is Gan-no painter, no sculptor, no maker of music.
We are kas-ka Gan. Not ka-Gan but kas-ka. Gan. Do you understand?
Do you… do you ken?”
“Yes,” Roland said. The prophets of Gan or the singers of Gan: it could signify either or both. And now he knew why he had asked. “And the song you sing is Ves -Ka Gan. Isn’t it?”
“Oh, yesl” King said, and smiled. “The Song of the Turde. It’s far too lovely for the likes of me, who can hardly carry a tune!”
“I don’t care,” Roland said. He thought as hard and as clearly as his dazed mind would allow. “And now you’ve been hurt.”
“Am I paralyzed?”
“I don’t know.” Nor care. “All I know is that you’ll live, and when you can write again, you’ll listen for the Song of the Turtle,
Ves’-Ka Gan, as you did before. Paralyzed or not. And this time you’ll sing until the song is done.”
“All right.”
“You’ll-”
“And Urs-Ka Gan, the Song of the Bear,” King interrupted him. Then he shook his head, although this clearly hurt him despite the hypnotic state he was in. “Urs-A-Ka Gan.”
The Cry of die Bear? The Scream of the Bear? Roland didn’t know which. He would have to hope it didn’t matter, that it was no more than a writer’s quibble.
A car hauling a motor home went past the scene of die accident without slowing, then a pair of large motor-bicycles sped by heading the other way. And an oddly persuasive thought came to Roland: time hadn’t stopped, but they were, for the time being, dim. Being protected in that fashion by the Beam, which was no longer under attack and thus able to help, at least a litde.
FOUR
Tell him again. There must be no misunderstanding. And no weakening, as he weakened befo
re.
He bent down until his face was before King’s face, their noses nearly touching. “This time you’ll sing until the song is done, write until the tale is done. Do you truly ken?”
“’And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,’” King said dreamily. “I wish I could write that.”
“So do I.” And he did, more than anything. Despite his sorrow, there were no tears yet; his eyes felt like hot stones in his head. Perhaps the tears would come later, when the truth of what had happened here had a chance to sink in a litde.
“I’ll do as you say, gunslinger. No matter how the tale falls when the pages grow thin.” King’s voice was itself growing thin. Roland thought he would soon fall into unconsciousness.
“I’m sorry for your friends, truly I am.”
“Thank you,” Roland said, still restraining the urge to put his hands around the writer’s neck and choke the life out of him.
He started to stand, but King said something that stopped him.
“Did yovi listen for her song, as I told you to do? For the Song of Susannah?”
“I… yes.”
Now King forced himself up on one elbow, and although his strength was clearly failing, his voice was dry and strong. “She needs you. And you need her. Leave me alone now. Save your hate for those who deserve it more. I didn’t make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world, and we both know it. Put your foolishness behind you-and your grief-and do as you’d have me do.” King’s voice rose to a rough shout; his hand shot out and gripped Roland’s wrist with amazing strength. “Finish the job!”
At first nothing came out when Roland tried to reply. He had to clear his throat and start again. “Sleep, sai-sleep and forget everyone here except the man who hit you.”
King’s eyes slipped closed. “Forget everyone here except the man who hit me.”
