Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  At this, Roland reached out and pushed the STOP button on the tape recorder. “We knew he was … odd,” he told the others. “We knew he was special. Sometimes Cuthbert would say, ‘What is it about that boy? He makes my skin itch!’ And then he showed up in Gilead, he and his mule, Cappi. Claimed to have followed us. And we knew that was impossible, but so much was happening by then that a saloon-boy from Mejis—not bright but cheerful and helpful—was the least of our worries.”

  “He teleported, didn’t he?” Jake asked.

  Roland, who had never even heard the word before today, nodded immediately. “At least part of the distance; he had to have. For one thing, how else could he have crossed the Xay River? There was only the one bridge, a thing made out of ropes, and once we were across, Alain cut it. We watched it fall into the water a thousand feet below.”

  “Maybe he went around,” Jake said.

  Roland nodded. “Maybe he did … but it would have taken him at least six hundred wheels out of his way.”

  Susannah whistled.

  Eddie waited to see if Roland had more to say. When it was clear he didn’t, Eddie leaned forward and pushed the PLAY button again. Ted’s voice filled the cave once more.

  “Sheemie’s a teleport. Dinky himself is a precog … among other things. Unfortunately, a good many avenues into the future are blocked to him. If you’re wondering if young sai Earnshaw knows how all this is going to turn out, the answer is no.

  “In any case, there’s this hypodermic hole in the living flesh of reality … this balcony on the flank of the Dark Tower … this Gingerbread House. A real place, as hard as that might be to believe. It’s here that we’ll store the weapons and camping gear we eventually mean to leave for you in one of the caves on the far side of SteekTete, and it’s here that I’m making this tape. When I left my room with this old-fashioned but fearsomely efficient machine under my arm, it was 10:14 AM, BHST—Blue Heaven Standard Time. When I return, it will still be 10:14 AM. No matter how long I stay. That is only one of the terribly convenient things about Gingerbread House.

  “You need to understand—perhaps Sheemie’s old friend Roland already does—that we are three rebels in a society dedicated to the idea of going along to get along, even if it means the end of existence … and sooner rather than later. We have a number of extremely useful talents, and by pooling them we’ve managed to stay one step ahead. But if Prentiss or Finli o’ Tego—he’s Prentiss’s Security Chief—finds out what we’re trying to do, Dinky would be worm-food by nightfall. Sheemie as well, quite likely. I’d probably be safe awhile longer, for reasons I’ll get to, but if Pimli Prentiss found out we were trying to bring a true gunslinger into his affairs—one who may already have orchestrated the deaths of over five dozen Greencloaks not far from here—even my life might not be safe.” A pause. “Worthless thing that it is.”

  There was a longer pause. The reel that had been empty was now half-full. “Listen, then,” Brautigan said, “and I’ll tell you the story of an unfortunate and unlucky man. It may be a longer story than you have time to listen to; if that be the case, I’m sure at least three of you will understand the use of the button labeled FF. As for me, I’m in a place where clocks are obsolete and broccoli is no doubt prohibited by law. I have all the time in the world.”

  Eddie was again struck by how weary the man sounded.

  “I’d just suggest that you not fast-forward unless you really have to. As I’ve said, there may be something here that can help you, although I don’t know what. I’m simply too close to it. And I’m tired of keeping my guard up, not just when I’m awake but when I’m sleeping, too. If I wasn’t able to slip away to Gingerbread House every now and again and sleep with no defenses, Finli’s can-toi boys would surely have bagged the three of us a long time ago. There’s a sofa in the corner, also made out of those wonderful non-stick marshmallows. I can go there and lie down and have the nightmares I need to have in order to keep my sanity. Then I can go back to the DevarToi, where my job isn’t just protecting myself but protecting Sheemie and Dink, too. Making sure that when we go about our covert business, it appears to the guards and their fucking telemetry that we were right where we belonged the whole time: in our suites, in The Study, maybe taking in a movie at the Gem or grabbing ice cream sodas at Henry Graham’s Drug Store and Fountain afterward. It also means continuing to Break, and every day I can feel the Beam we’re currently working on—Bear and Turtle—bending more and more.

  “Get here quick, boys. That’s my wish for you. Get here just as quick as ever you can. Because it isn’t just a question of me slipping up, you know. Dinky’s got a terrible temper and a habit of going off on foul-mouthed tirades if someone pushes his hot-buttons. He could say the wrong thing in a state like that. And Sheemie does his best, but if someone were to ask him the wrong question or catch him doing the wrong thing when I’m not around to fix it …”

  Brautigan didn’t finish that particular thought. As far as his listeners were concerned, he didn’t need to.

  THREE

  When he begins again, it’s to tell them he was born in Milford, Connecticut, in the year 1898. We have all heard similar introductory lines, enough to know that they signal—for better or worse—the onset of autobiography. Yet as they listen to that voice, the gunslingers are visited by another familiarity; this is true even of Oy. At first they’re not able to put their finger on it, but in time it comes to them. The story of Ted Brautigan, a Wandering Accountant instead of a Wandering Priest, is in many ways similar to that of Pere Donald Callahan. They could almost be twins. And the sixth listener—the one beyond the blanket-blocked cave entrance in the windy dark—hears with growing sympathy and understanding. Why not? Booze isn’t a major player in Brautigan’s story, as it was in the Pere’s, but it’s still a story of addiction and isolation, the story of an outsider.

  FOUR

  At the age of eighteen, Theodore Brautigan is accepted into Harvard, where his Uncle Tim went, and Uncle Tim—childless himself—is more than willing to pay for Ted’s higher education. And so far as Timothy Atwood knows, what happens is perfectly straightforward: offer made, offer accepted, nephew shines in all the right areas, nephew graduates and prepares to enter uncle’s furniture business after six months spent touring post–World War I Europe.

  What Uncle Tim doesn’t know is that before going to Harvard, Ted tries to enlist in what will soon be known as the American Expeditionary Force. “Son,” the doctor tells him, “you’ve got one hell of a loud heart murmur, and your hearing is substandard. Now are you going to tell me that you came here not knowing those things would get you a red stamp? Because, pardon me if I’m out of line, here, you look too smart for that.”

  And then Ted Brautigan does something he’s never done before, has sworn he never will do. He asks the Army doc to pick a number, not just between one and ten but between one and a thousand . To humor him (it’s rainy in Hartford, and that means things are slow in the enlistment office), the doctor thinks of the number 748. Ted gives it back to him. Plus 419 …89… and 997. When Ted invites him to think of a famous person, living or dead, and when Ted tells him Andrew Johnson, not Jackson but Johnson, the doc is finally amazed. He calls over another doc, a friend, and Ted goes through the same rigmarole again … with one exception. He asks the second doctor to pick a number between one and a million, then tells the doctor he was thinking of eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and sixteen. The second doctor looks momentarily surprised—stunned, in fact— then covers with a big shitlicking smile. “Sorry, son,” he says, “you were only off by a hundred and thirty thousand or so.” Ted looks at him, not smiling, not responding to the shitlicking smile in any way at all of which he is aware, but he’s eighteen, and still young enough to be flabbergasted by such utter and seemingly pointless mendacity. Meanwhile, Doc Number Two’s shitlicking smile has begun to fade on its own. Doc Number Two turns to Doc Number One and says “Look at his eyes, Sam— look at what’s happening to his eyes.
”

  The first doctor tries to shine an ophthalmoscope in Ted’s eyes and Ted brushes it impatiently aside. He has access to mirrors and has seen the way his pupils sometimes expand and contract, is aware when it’s happening even when there’s no mirror handy by a kind of shuttering, stuttering effect in his vision, and it doesn’t interest him, especially not now. What interests him now is that Doc Number Two is fucking with him and he doesn’t know why. “Write the number down this time,” he invites. “Write it down so you can’t cheat.”

  Doc Number Two blusters. Ted reiterates his challenge. Doc Sam produces a piece of paper and a pen and the second doctor takes it. He is actually about to write a number when he reconsiders and tosses the pen on Sam’s desk and says: “This is some kind of cheap streetcorner trick, Sam. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.” And stalks away.

  Ted invites Dr. Sam to think of a relative, any relative, and a moment later tells the doctor he’s thinking of his brother Guy, who died of appendicitis when Guy was fourteen; ever since, their mother has called Guy Sam’s guardian angel. This time Dr. Sam looks as though he’s been slapped. At last he’s afraid. Whether it’s the odd in-and-out movement of Ted’s pupils, or the matter-of-fact demonstration of telepathy with no dramatic forehead-rubbing, no “I’m getting a picture… wait …,” Dr. Sam is finally afraid. He stamps REJECTEDon Ted’s enlistment application with the big red stamp and tries to get rid of him—next case, who wants to go to France and sniff the mustard gas?—but Ted takes his arm in a grip which is gentle but not in the least tentative.

  “Listen to me,” says Ted Stevens Brautigan. “I am a genuine telepath. I’ve suspected it since I was six or seven years old—old enough to know the word— and I’ve known it for sure since I was sixteen. I could be of great help in Army Intelligence, and my substandard hearing and heart murmur wouldn’t matter in such a post. As for the thing with my eyes?” He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a pair of sunglasses, and slips them on. “Ta-da!”

  He gives Dr. Sam a tentative smile. It does no good. There is a Sergeant-at-Arms standing at the door of the temporary recruitment office in East Hartford High’s physical education department, and the medic summons him. “This fellow is 4-F and I’m tired of arguing with him. Perhaps you’d be good enough to escort him off the premises.”

  Now it is Ted’s arm which is gripped, and none too gently.

  “Wait a minute!” Ted says. “There’s something else! Something even more valuable! I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but …”

  Before he can continue, the Sergeant-at-Arms drags him out and hustles him rapidly down the hall, past several gawking boys and girls almost exactly his own age. There is a word, and he’ll learn it years later, in Blue Heaven. The word is facilitator, and as far as Paul “Pimli” Prentiss is concerned, it makes Ted Stevens Brautigan just about the most valuable hume in the universe.

  Not on that day in 1916, though. On that day in 1916, he is dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on the granite step outside the main doors and told by a man with a foot-thick accent that “Y’all just want t’stay outta heah, boa.” After some consideration, Ted decides the Sergeant-at-Arms isn’t calling him a snake; boa in this context is most likely Dixie for boy.

  For a little while Ted just stands where he has been left. He’s thinking What does it take to convince you? and How blind can you be? He can’t believe what just happened to him.

  But he has to believe it, because here he is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartford he thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe. None of them. Not ever. They’ll refuse to see that a fellow who could read the collective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow who could tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push was going to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times— maybe even just once or twice!—might be able to end the war by Christmas. But he won’t have the chance because they won’t give it to him. And why? It has something to do with the second doctor changing his number when Ted landed on it, and then refusing to write another one down. Because somewhere down deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.

  It’s something like that.

  Fuck it, then. He’ll go to Harvard on his uncle’s nickel.

  And does. Harvard’s all Dinky told them, and more: Drama, Debate, Harvard Crimson,Mathematical Odd Fellows and, of course, the capper, Phi Beta Crapper. He even saves Unc a few bucks by graduating early.

  He is in the south of France, the war long over, when a telegram reaches him: UNCLE DEAD STOP RETURN HOME SOONEST STOP.

  The key word here seemed to be STOP.

  God knows it was one of those watershed moments. He went home, yes, and he gave comfort where comfort was due, yes. But instead of stepping into the furniture business, Ted decides to STOP his march toward financial success and START his march toward financial obscurity. In the course of the man’s long story, Roland’s ka-tet never once hears Ted Brautigan blame his deliberate anonymity on his outré talent, or on his moment of epiphany: this is one valuable talent that no one in the world wants.

  And God, how he comes to understand that! For one thing, his “wild talent” (as the pulp science-fiction magazines sometimes call it) is actually physically dangerous under the right circumstances. Or the wrong ones.

  In 1935, in Ohio, it makes Ted Brautigan a murderer.

  He has no doubt that some would feel the word is too harsh, but he will be the judge of that in this particular case, thank you oh so very much, and he thinks the word is apt. It’s Akron and it’s a blue summer dusk and kids are playing kick-the-can at one end of Stossy Avenue and stickball at the other and Brautigan stands on the corner in a summerweight suit, stands by the pole with the white stripe painted on it, the white stripe that means the bus stops here. Behind him is a deserted candystore with a blue NRA eagle in one window and a whitewashed message in the other that says THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN. Ted is just standing there with his scuffed cordovan briefcase and a brown sack— a pork chop for his supper, he got it at Mr. Dale’s Fancy Butcher Shop—when all at once somebody runs into him from behind and he’s driven into the telephone pole with the white stripe on it. He connects nose-first. His nose breaks. It sprays blood. Then his mouth connects, and he feels his teeth cut into the soft lining of his lips, and all at once his mouth is filled with a salty taste like hot tomato juice. There’s a thud in the small of his back and a ripping sound. His trousers are pulled halfway down over his ass by the force of the hit, hanging crooked and twisted, like the pants of a clown, and all at once a guy in a tee-shirt and gabardine slacks with a shiny seat is running off down Stossy Avenue toward the stickball game and that thing flapping in his right hand, flapping like a brown leather tongue, why, that thing is Ted Brautigan’s wallet. He has just been mugged out of his wallet, by God!

  The purple dusk of that summer night deepens suddenly to full dark, then lightens up again, then deepens once more. It’s his eyes, doing the trick that so amazed the second doctor almost twenty years before, but Ted hardly notices. His attention is fixed on the fleeing man, the son of a bitch who just mugged him out of his wallet and spoiled his face in the process. He’s never been so angry in his life, never, and although the thought he sends at the fleeing man is innocuous, almost gentle

  (say buddy I would’ve given you a dollar if you’d asked maybe even two)

  it has the deadly weight of a thrown spear. And it was a spear. It takes him some time to fully accept that, but when the time comes he realizes that he’s a murderer and if there’s a God, Ted Brautigan will someday have to stand at His throne and answer for what he’s just done. The fleeing man looks like he stumbles over something, but there’s nothing there, only HARRY LOVES BELINDA printed on the cracked sidewalk in fading chalk. The sentiment is surrounded with childish doodles—stars, a comet, a crescent moon—which he will later come to fear. Ted feels like he
just took a spear in the middle of the back himself, but he, at least, is still standing. And he didn’t mean it. There’s that. He knows in his heart that he didn’t mean it. He was just …surprised into anger.

  He picks up his wallet and sees the stickball kids staring at him, their mouths open. He points his wallet at them like some kind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the boy holding the sawed-off broomhandle flinches. It’s the flinch even more than the falling body that will haunt Ted’s dreams for the next year or so, and then off and on for the rest of his life. Because he likes kids, would never scare one on purpose. And he knows what they are seeing: a man with his pants mostly pulled down so his boxer shorts show (for all he knows his dingus could be hanging out of the fly front, and wouldn’t that just be the final magical touch), a wallet in his hand and a loony look on his bloody kisser.

  “You didn’t see anything!” he shouts at them. “You hear me, now! You hear me! You didn’t see anything!”

  Then he hitches up his pants. Then he goes back to his briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brown paper sack, fuck the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one of his incisors. Then he takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and the frightened kids. Then he runs.

  Which turns into a career.

  FIVE

  The end of the second tape pulled free of the hub and made a soft fwip-fwip-fwip sound as it turned.

  “Jesus,” Susannah said. “Jesus, that poor man.”