by Stephen King
“Bring youah best shots,” Flaherty said in his Back Bay/John F. Kennedy accent. “Have at it.”
Lamla ordered three low men and one of the vamps forward, put two on each side, and talked to them rapidly in another language. Flaherty gathered that a couple of them had already been down here and, like Lam, remembered about where the projectors lay hidden in the walls.
Meanwhile, Flaherty’s dragon—or, more properly speaking, his da’s dragon—continued to rampage in the deep dark forest (the jungle was completely gone now) and set things on fire.
At last—although it seemed a very long time to Flaherty, it was probably less than thirty seconds — the sharpshooters began to fire. Almost immediately both forest and dragon paled before Flaherty’s eyes, turned into something that looked like overexposed movie footage.
“That’s one of em, cullies!” Lamla yelled in a voice that became unfortunately ovine when it was raised. “Pour it on! Pour it on for the love of your fathers!”
Half this crew probably never had such a thing, Flaherty thought morosely. Then came the clearly audible shatter-sound of breaking glass and the dragon froze in place with billows of flame issuing from its mouth and nostrils, as well as from the gills on the sides of its armored throat.
Encouraged, the sharpshooters began firing faster, and a few moments later the clearing and the frozen dragon both disappeared. Where they had been was only more tiled hallway, with the tracks of those who had recently passed this way marking the dust. On either side were the shattered projector portals.
“All right!” Flaherty yelled after giving Lamla an approving nod. “Now we’re going after the kid, and we’re going to double-time it, and we’re going to catch him, and we’re going to bring him back with his head on a stick! Are you with me?”
They roared savage agreement, none louder than Lamla, whose eyes glowed the same baleful yellow-orange as the dragon’s breath.
“Good, then!” Flaherty set off, roaring a tune any Marine drill-corps would have recognized: “We don’t care how far you run—”
“WE DON’T CARE HOW FAR YOU RUN!” they bawled back as they trotted four abreast through the place where Jake’s jungle had been. Their feet crunched in the shattered glass.
“We’ll bring you back before we’re done!”
“WE’LL BRING YOU BACK BEFORE WE’RE DONE!”
“You can run to Cain or Lud—”
“YOU CAN RUN TO CAIN OR LUD!”
“We’ll eat your balls and drink your blood!”
They called it in return, and Flaherty picked up the pace yet a little more.
ELEVEN
Jake heard them coming again, come-come-commala. Heard them promising to eat his balls and drink his blood.
Brag, brag, brag, he thought, but tried to run faster, anyway. He was alarmed to find he couldn’t. Doing the mindswap with Oy had tired him out quite a little b—
No.
Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied. Jake had done his best to heed this advice, and as a result admitted that “being tired” no longer described his situation. The stitch in his side had grown fangs that had sunk deep into his armpit. He knew he had gained on his pursuers; he also knew from the shouted cadence-chant that they were making up the distance they’d lost. Soon they would be shooting at him and Oy again, and while men didn’t shoot for shit while they were running, someone could always get lucky.
Now he saw something up ahead, blocking the corridor. A door. As he approached it, Jake allowed himself to wonder what he’d do if Susannah wasn’t on the other side. Or if she was there but didn’t know how to help him.
Well, he and Oy would make a stand, that was all. No cover, no way to reenact Thermopylae Pass this time, but he’d throw plates and take heads until they brought him down.
If he needed to, that was.
Maybe he would not.
Jake pounded toward the door, his breath now hot in his throat — close to burning — and thought, It’s just as well. I couldn’t have run much further, anyway.
Oy got there first. He put his front paws on the ghostwood and looked up as if reading the words stamped into the door and the message flashing below them. Then he looked back at Jake, who came panting up with one hand pressed against his armpit and the remaining Orizas clanging loudly back and forth in their bag.
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
New York/Fedic
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
#9 FINAL DEFAULT
He tried the doorknob, but that was only a formality. When the chilly metal refused to turn in his grip, he didn’t bother trying again but hammered the heels of both hands against the wood, instead. “Susannah!” he shouted. “If you’re there, let me in!”
Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin he heard his father say, and his mother, much more gravely, as if she knew storytelling was serious business: I heard a fly buzz … when I died.
From behind the door there was nothing. From behind Jake, the chanting voices of the Crimson King’s posse swept closer.
“Susannah!” he bawled, and when there was no answer this time he turned, put his back to the door (hadn’t he always known it would end just this way, with his back to a locked door?), and seized an Oriza in each hand. Oy stood between his feet, and now his fur was bushed out, now the velvety-soft skin of his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.
Jake crossed his arms, assuming “the load.”
“Come on then, you bastards,” he said. “For Gilead and the Eld. For Roland, son of Steven. For me and Oy.”
At first he was too fiercely concentrated on dying well, of taking at least one of them with him (the fellow who’d told him the Faddah was dinnah would be his personal preference) and more if he could, to realize the voice he was hearing had come from the other side of the door rather than from his own mind.
“Jake! Is it really you, sugarpie?”
His eyes widened. Oh please let it not be a trick. If it was, Jake reckoned that he would never be played another.
“Susannah, they’re coming! Do you know how—”
“Yes! Should still be chassit, do you hear me? If Nigel’s right, the word should still be cha—”
Jake didn’t give her a chance to finish saying it again. Now he could see them sweeping toward him, running full-out. Some waving guns and already shooting into the air.
“Chassit!” he yelled. “Chassit for the Tower! Open! Open, you son of a bitch!”
Behind his pressing back the door between New York and Fedic clicked open. At the head of the charging posse, Flaherty saw it happen, uttered the bitterest curse in his lexicon, and fired a single bullet. He was a good shot, and all the force of his not inconsiderable will went with that particular slug, guiding it. No doubt it would have punched through Jake’s forehead above the left eye, entering his brain and ending his life, had not a strong, brown-fingered hand seized Jake by the collar at that very moment and yanked him backward through the shrill elevator-shaft whistle that sounds endlessly between the levels of the Dark Tower. The bullet buzzed by his head instead of entering it.
Oy came with him, barking his friend’s name shrilly — Ake-Ake, Ake-Ake!—and the door slammed shut behind them. Flaherty reached it twenty seconds later and hammered on it until his fists bled (when Lamla tried to restrain him, Flaherty thrust him back with such ferocity that the taheen went a-sprawl), but there was nothing he could do. Hammering did not work; cursing did not work; nothing worked.
At the very last minute, the boy and the bumbler had eluded them. For yet a little while longer the core of Roland’s ka-tet remained unbroken.
CHAPTER VI:
ON TURTLEBACK LANE
ONE
See this, I do beg ya, and see it very well, for it’s one of the most beautiful places that still remain in America.
I’d show you a homely dirt lane running along a heavily wooded switchback ridge in
western Maine, its north and south ends spilling onto Route 7 about two miles apart. Just west of this ridge, like a jeweler’s setting, is a deep green dimple in the landscape. At the bottom of it—the stone in the setting—is Kezar Lake. Like all mountain lakes, it may change its aspect half a dozen times in the course of a single day, for here the weather is beyond prankish; you could call it half-mad and be perfectly accurate. The locals will be happy to tell you about icecream snow flurries that came to this part of the world once in late August (that would be 1948) and once spang on the Glorious Fourth (1959). They’ll be even more delighted to tell you about the tornado that came blasting across the lake’s frozen surface in January of 1971, sucking up snow and creating a whirling mini-blizzard that crackled with thunder in its middle. Hard to believe such crazy-jane weather, but you could go and see Gary Barker, if you don’t believe me; he’s got the pictures to prove it.
Today the lake at the bottom of the dimple is blacker than homemade sin, not just reflecting the thunderheads massing overhead but amplifying their mood. Every now and then a splinter of silver streaks across that obsidian looking-glass as lightning stabs out of the clouds overhead. The sound of thunder rolls through the congested sky west to east, like the wheels of some great stone bucka rolling down an alley in the sky. The pines and oaks and birches are still and all the world holds its breath. All shadows have disappeared. The birds have fallen silent. Overhead another of those great waggons rolls its solemn course, and in its wake—hark!—we hear an engine. Soon enough John Cullum’s dusty Ford Galaxie appears with Eddie Dean’s anxious face rising behind the wheel and the headlights shining in the premature gathering dark.
TWO
Eddie opened his mouth to ask Roland how far they were going, but of course he knew. Turtleback Lane’s south end was marked by a sign bearing a large black 1, and each of the driveways splitting off lakeward to their left bore another, higher number. They caught glimpses of the water through the trees, but the houses themselves were below them on the slope and tucked out of sight. Eddie seemed to taste ozone and electric grease with every breath he drew, and twice patted the hair on the nape of his neck, sure it would be standing on end. It wasn’t, but knowing it didn’t change the nervous, witchy feeling of exhilaration that kept sweeping through him, lighting up his solar plexus like an overloaded circuit-breaker and spreading out from there. It was the storm, of course; he just happened to be one of those people who feel them coming along the ends of their nerves. But never one’s approach as strongly as this.
It’s not all the storm, and you know it.
No, of course not. Although he thought all those wild volts might somehow have facilitated his contact with Susannah. It came and went like the reception you sometimes got from distant radio stations at night, but since their meeting with
(Ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost )
Chevin of Chayven, it had become much stronger. Because this whole part of Maine was thin, he suspected, and close to many worlds. Just as their ka-tet was close to whole again. For Jake was with Susannah, and the two of them seemed to be safe enough for the time being, with a solid door between them and their pursuers. Yet there was something ahead of those two, as well—something Susannah either didn’t want to talk about or couldn’t make clear. Even so, Eddie had sensed both her horror of it and her terror that it might come back, and he thought he knew what it was: Mia’s baby. Which had been Susannah’s as well in some way he still didn’t fully understand. Why an armed woman should be afraid of an infant, Eddie didn’t know, but he was sure that if she was, there must be a good reason for it.
They passed a sign that said FENN, 11, and another that said ISRAEL, 12. Then they came around a curve and Eddie stamped on the Galaxie’s brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the side of the road beside a sign reading BECKHARDT, 13, was a familiar Ford pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the truck’s rust-spotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue chambray shirt buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, wattled neck. He also wore a Boston Red Sox cap tilted just a little to one side as if to say I got the drop on you, partner. He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and good-humored face on the breathless pre-storm air.
All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up nerves, aware that he was smiling as you do when you come across an old friend in a strange place—the Pyramids of Egypt, the marketplace in old Tangiers, maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane in Lovell on a thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also smiling. Old long, tall, and ugly—smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed.
They got out of the car and approached John Cullum. Roland raised a fist to his forehead and bent his knee a little. “Hile, John! I see you very well.”
“Ayuh, see you, too,” John Cullum said. “Clear as day.” He skimmed a salute outward from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he dipped his chin in Eddie’s direction. “Young fella.”
“Long days and pleasant nights,” Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.
“That’s a pretty thing to say,” John remarked. Then: “I beat you here. Kinda thought I might.”
Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it. “I don’t think this is quite the place … ?” In his voice was the barest touch of a question.
“Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up,” John agreed, puffing his pipe. “I passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it.” For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in a jar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s up there? Is it walkins? Or is it a door?” The idea occurred to him … and then seized him. “It is a door, isn’t it? And it’s open!”
John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider. “Might be a door,” he said, stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day: doe-ahh. “Doesn’t exactly look like a door, but … ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in that light?” He appeared to calculate. “Ayuh. But I think you boys want to palaver, and if we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won’t be no palaver; just you standin there with your jaws dropped.” Cullum threw back his head and laughed. “Me, too!”
“What’s Cara Laughs?” Eddie asked.
John shrugged. “A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale. They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she …” He made a bottle-tipping motion.
Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn’t understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.
He looked up and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West toward the White Mountains, too— what was almost surely called the Discordia in a world not far from here—and along the Path of the Beam.
Always along the Path of the Beam.
“What do you suggest, John?” Roland asked.
Cullum nodded at the sign reading BECKHARDT. “I’ve care-took for Dick Beckhardt since the late fifties,” he said. “Helluva nice man. He’s in Wasin’ton now, doin something with the Carter administration.” Caaa-
tah. “I got a key. I think maybe we ought to go on down there. It’s warm n dry, and I don’t think it’s gonna be either one out here before long. You boys c’n tell your tale, and I c’n listen—which is a thing I do tol’ably well—and then we can all take a run up to Cara. I … well I just never…” He shook his head, took his pipe out of his mouth, and looked at them with naked wonder. “I never seen the beat of it, I tell you. It was like I didn’t even know how to look at it.”
“Come on,” Roland said. “We’ll all ride down in your cartomobile, if it does ya.”
“Does me just fine,” John said, and got into the back.
THREE
Dick Beckhardt’s cottage was half a mile down, pine-walled, cozy. There was a pot-bellied stove in the living room and a braided rug on the floor. The west-facing wall was glass from end to end and Eddie had to stand there for a moment, looking out, in spite of the urgency of their errand. The lake had gone a shade of dead ebony that was somehow frightening—like the eye of a zombie, he thought, and had no idea why he thought it. He had an idea that if the wind picked up (as it would surely do when the rain came), the whitecaps would ruffle the surface and make it easier to look at. Would take away that look of something looking back at you.
John Cullum sat at Dick Beckhardt’s table of polished pine, took off his hat, and held it in the bunched fingers of his right hand. He looked at Roland and Eddie gravely. “We know each other pretty damn well for folks who haven’t known each other very damn long,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so?”
They nodded. Eddie kept expecting the wind to begin outside, but the world went on holding its breath. He was willing to bet it was going to be one hellacious storm when it came.
“Folks gut t’know each other that way in the Army,” John said. “In the war.” Aaa-my. And war too Yankee for representation. “Way it always is when the chips’re down, I sh’d judge.”
