Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  “And just before I took the plunge, Sheemie thought to me, ‘Look for my friend Will Dearborn. His real name is Roland. His friends are dead, but I know he’s not, because I can hear him. He’s a gunslinger, and he has new friends. Bring them here and they’ll make the bad folks stop hurting the Beam, the way he made Jonas and his friends stop when they were going to kill me.’ For Sheemie, this was a sermon.

  “I closed my eyes and went through. There was a brief sensation of being turned on my head, but that was all. No chimes, no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared to the Santa Mira doorway. I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy highway. There was a piece of newspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked it up and saw I’d landed in April of 1960, almost five years after Armitage and his friends herded us through the door in Santa Mira, on the other side of the country. I was looking at a piece of the Hartford Courant, you see. And the road turned out to be the Merritt Parkway.”

  “Sheemie can make magic doors!” Roland cried. He had been cleaning his revolver as he listened, but now he put it aside. “That’s what teleporting is! That’s what it means!”

  “Hush, Roland,” Susannah said. “This must be his Connecticut adventure. I want to hear this part.”

  ELEVEN

  But none of them hear about Ted’s Connecticut adventure. He simply calls it “a story for another day” and tells his listeners that he was caught in Bridgeport while trying to accumulate enough cash to disappear permanently. The low men bundled him into a car, drove him to New York, and took him to a ribjoint called the Dixie Pig. From there to Fedic, and from Fedic to Thunderclap Station; from the station right back to the DevarToi, oh Ted, so good to see you, welcome back.

  The fourth tape is now three-quarters done, and Ted’s voice is little more than a croak. Nevertheless, he gamely pushes on.

  “I hadn’t been gone long, but over here time had taken one of its erratic slips forward. Humma o’ Tego was out, possibly because of me, and Prentiss of New Jersey, the ki’-dam, was in. He and Finli interrogated me in the Master’s suite a good many times. There was no physical torture—I guess they still reckoned me too important to chance spoiling me— but there was a lot of discomfort and plenty of mindgames. They also made it clear that if I tried to run again, my Connecticut friends would be put to death. I said, ‘Don’t you boys get it? If I keep doing my job, they’re going out, anyway. Everybody’s going out, with the possible exception of the one you call the Crimson King.’

  “Prentiss steepled his fingers in the annoying way he has and said, ‘That may be or may not be true, sai, but if it is, we won’t suffer when we “go out,” as you put it. Little Bobby and little Carol, on the other hand … not to mention Carol’s mother and Bobby’s friend, Sully-John …’ He didn’t have to finish. I still wonder if they knew how terribly frightened they’d made me with that threat against my young friends. And how terribly angry.

  “All their questions came down to two things they really wanted to know: Why had I run, and who helped me do it. I could have fallen back on the old name–rank–serial number routine, but decided to chance being a bit more expansive. I’d wanted to run, I said, because I’d gotten a glimmering from some of the can-toi guards about what we were really doing, and I didn’t like the idea. As for how I’d gotten out, I told them I didn’t know. I went to sleep one night, I said, and just woke up beside the Merritt Parkway. They went from scoffing at this story to semi-believing it, mostly because I never varied it a single jot or tittle, no matter how many times they asked. And of course they already knew how powerful I was, and in ways that were different from the others.

  “‘Do you think you’re a teleport in some subconscious way, sai?’ Finli asked me.

  “‘How could I say?’ I asked in turn—always answer a question with a question is a good rule to follow during interrogation, I think, as long as it’s a relatively soft interrogation, as this one was. ‘I’ve never sensed any such ability, but of course we don’t always know what’s lurking in our subconscious, do we?’

  “‘You better hope it wasn’t you,’ Prentiss said. ‘We can live with almost any wild talent around here except that one. That one, Mr. Brautigan, would spell the end even for such a valued employee as yourself.’ I wasn’t sure I believed that, but later Trampas gave me reason to think Prentiss might have been telling the truth. Anyway, that was my story and I never went beyond it.

  “Prentiss’s houseboy, a fellow named Tassa—a hume, if it matters—would bring in cookies and cans of Nozz-A-La—which I like because it tastes a bit like root beer—and Prentiss would offer me all I wanted … after, that was, I told them where I’d gotten my information and how I’d escaped Algul Siento. Then the whole round of questions would start again, only this time with Prentiss and the Wease munching cookies and drinking Nozzie. But at some point they’d always give in and allow me a drink and a bite to eat. As interrogators, I’m afraid there just wasn’t enough Nazi in them to make me give up my secrets. They tried to prog me, of course, but … have you heard that old saying about never bullshitting a bullshitter?”

  Eddie and Susannah both nod. So does Jake, who has heard his father say that during numerous conversations concerning Programming at the Network.

  “I bet you have,” Ted resumes. “Well, it’s also fair to say that you can’t prog a progger, at least not one who’s gone beyond a certain level of understanding. And I’d better get to the point before my voice gives out entirely.

  “One day about three weeks after the low men hauled me back, Trampas approached me on Main Street in Pleasantville. By then I’d met Dinky, had identified him as a kindred spirit, and was, with his help, getting to know Sheemie better. A lot was going on in addition to my daily interrogations in Warden’s House. I’d hardly even thought about Trampas since returning, but he’d thought of little else than me. As I quickly found out.

  “‘I know the answers to the questions they keep asking you,’ he said. ‘What I don’tknow is why you haven’t given me up.’

  “I said the idea had never crossed my mind—that tattle-taleing wasn’t the way I’d been raised to do things. And besides, it wasn’t as if they were putting an electrified cattle-prod up my rectum or pulling my fingernails … although they might have resorted to such techniques, had it been anyone other than me. The worst they’d done was to make me look at the plate of cookies on Prentiss’s desk for an hour and a half before relenting and letting me have one.

  “‘I was angry at you at first,’ Trampas said, ‘but then I realized— reluctantly—that I might have done the same thing in your place. The first week you were back I didn’t sleep much, I can tell you. I’d lie on my bed there in Damli, expecting them to come for me at any minute. You know what they’d do if they found out it was me, don’t you?’

  “I told him I did not. He said that he’d be flogged by Gaskie, Finli’s Second, and then sent rawbacked into the wastes, either to die in the Discordia or to find service in the castle of the Red King. But such a trip would not be easy. Southeast of Fedic one may also contract such things as the Eating Sickness (probably cancer, but a kind that’s very fast, very painful, and very nasty) or what they just call the Crazy. The Children of Roderick commonly suffer from both these problems, and others, as well. The minor skin diseases of Thunderclap—the eczema, pimples, and rashes—are apparently only the beginning of one’s problems in End-World. But for an exile, service in the Court of the Crimson King would be the only hope. Certainly a can-toi such as Trampas couldn’t go to the Callas. They’re closer, granted, and there’s genuine sunshine there, but you can imagine what would happen to low men or the taheen in the Arc of the Callas.”

  Roland’s tet can imagine that very well.

  “‘Don’t make too much of it,’ I said. ‘As that new fellow Dinky might say, I don’t put my business on the street. It’s really as simple as that. There’s no chivalry involved.’

  “He said he was grateful nevertheless, then looked ar
ound and said, very low: ‘I’d pay you back for your kindness, Ted, by telling you to cooperate with them, to the extent that you can. I don’t mean you should get me in trouble, but I don’t want you to get in more trouble yourself, either. They may not need you quite as badly as you may think.’

  “And I’d have you hear me well now, lady and gentlemen, for this may be very important; I simply don’t know. All I know for certain is that what Trampas told me next gave me a terrible deep chill. He said that of all the other-side worlds, there’s one that’s unique. They call it the Real World. All Trampas seems to know about it is that it’s real in the same way Mid-World was, before the Beams began to weaken and Mid-World moved on. In America-side of this special ‘Real’ World, he says, time sometimes jerks but always runs one way: ahead. And in that world lives a man who also serves as a kind of facilitator; he may even be a mortal guardian of Gan’s Beam.”

  TWELVE

  Roland looked at Eddie, and as their eyes met, both mouthed the same word: King.

  THIRTEEN

  “Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has ever protected his life. ‘They say his song has cast the circle,’ Trampas told me, ‘although no one seems to know exactly what that means.’ Now, however, ka—not the Red King but plain old ka— has decreed that this man, this guardian or whatever he is, should die. He’s stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was supposed to sing, he’s stopped, and that has finally made him vulnerable. But not to the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it’s ka he’s vulnerable to. ‘He no longer sings,’ Trampas said. ‘His song, the one that matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose.’”

  FOURTEEN

  In the outer silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it.

  FIFTEEN

  “Trampas told me all this only so I’d understand I was no longer completely indispensable. Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor in bringing down Shardik’s Beam before this man’s death could cause Gan’s Beam to break.”

  A pause.

  “Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn’t be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn’t like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet …”

  SIXTEEN

  Roland, exasperated, twirled his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were listening could see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi guard knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some rambling, discursive sidetrack. It was understandable—the man was clearly exhausted—but there was something here more important than everything else. Eddie knew it, too. Roland could read it on the young man’s strained face. Together they watched the remaining brown tape—now no more than an eighth of an inch deep—melt away.

  SEVENTEEN

  “… yet we’re only poor benighted humies, and I suppose we can’t know about these things, not with any degree of certainty …”

  He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at last:

  “I asked this magic man’s name and Trampas said, ‘I know it not, Ted, but I do know there’s no magic in him anymore, for he’s ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do. If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of Ninety-nine, which is that of our world, will combine to—”

  But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.

  EIGHTEEN

  The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that low fwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressed STOP. He muttered “Fuck!” under his breath.

  “Just when it was getting interesting,” Jake said. “And those numbers again. Nineteen … and ninety-nine.” He paused, then said them together. “Nineteen-ninety-nine.” Then a third time. “1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to have her baby. Where Black Thirteen is now.”

  “Keystone World, Keystone Year,” Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle, held it up to one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. “Where time always goes in one direction. Like it’s s’posed to.”

  “Gan created time,” Roland said. “This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the void—some tales say from the sea, but both surely mean the Prim—and made the world. Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling and that was time.”

  Something was gathering in the cave. Some revelation. They all felt it, a thing as close to bursting as Mia’s belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been haunted by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the sky, saw them written on board fences, heard them in their dreams.

  Oy looked up, ears cocked, eyes bright.

  Susannah said, “When Mia left the room we were in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie Pig—room 1919, it was—I fell into a kind of trance. I had dreams … jailhouse-dreams … newscasters announcing that this one, that one, and t’other one had died—”

  “You told us,” Eddie said.

  She shook her head violently. “Not all of it, I didn’t. Because some of it didn’t seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy’s little boy was dead, for instance—little John-John, the one who saluted his Daddy’s coffin when the catafalque went by. I didn’t tell you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had little John-John Kennedy died in your whens? Either of your whens?”

  They shook their heads. Jake was not even sure of whom Susannah was speaking.

  “But he did. In the Keystone World, and in a when beyond any of ours. I bet it was in the when of ‘99. So dies the son of the last gunslinger, O Discordia. What I think now is that I was kind of hearing the obituary page from The Time Traveler’s Weekly. It was all different times mixed together. John-John Kennedy, then Stephen King. I’d never heard of him, but David Brinkley said he wrote ’Salem’s Lot. That’s the book Father Callahan was in, right?”

  Roland and Eddie nodded.

  “Father Callahan told us his story.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “But what—”

  She overrode him. Her eyes were hazy, distant. Eyes just a look away from understanding. “And then comes Brautigan to the Ka-Tet of Nineteen, and tells his tale. And look! Look at the tape counter!”

  They leaned over. In the windows were

  1999.

  “I think King might have written Ted’s story, too,” she said. “Anybody want to take a guess what year that story showed up, or will show up, in the Keystone World?”

  “1999,” Jake said, low. “But not the part we heard. The part we didn’t hear. Ted’s Connecticut Adventure.”

  “And you met him,” Susannah said, looking at her dinh and her husband. “You met Stephen King.”

  They nodded again.

  “He made the Pere, he made Brautigan, he made us,” she said, as if to herself, then shook her head. “No. ‘All things serve the Beam.’ He …he facilitated us.”

  “Yeah.” Eddie was nodding. “Yeah, okay. That feels just about right.”

  “In my dream I was in a cell,” she said. “I was wearing the clothes I had on when I got arrested. And David Brinkley said Stephen King was dead, woe, Discordia—something like that. Brinkley said he was …” She paused, frowning. She would have demanded that Roland hypnotize the complete recollection out of her if it had been necessary, but it turned out not to be. “Brinkley said King was killed by a minivan while walking near his home in Lovell, Maine.”

  Eddie jerked. Roland sat forward, his eyes burning. “Do you say so?”

  Susannah nodded firmly.

  “He bought the house on Turtleback Lane!” the gunslinger roared. He reached out and took hold of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie seemed not to even notice. “Of course he did! Ka speaks
and the wind blows! He moved a little further along the Path of the Beam and bought the house where it’s thin! Where we saw the walkins! Where we talked to John Cullum and then came back through! Do you doubt it? Do you doubt it so much as a single goddam bit?”

  Eddie shook his head. Of course he didn’t doubt it. It had a ring, like the one you got when you were at the carnival and hit the pedal just right with the mallet, hit it with all your force, and the lead slug flew straight to the top of the post and rang the bell up there. You got a Kewpie doll when you rang the bell, and was that because Stephen King thought it was a Kewpie doll? Because King came from the world where Gan started time rolling with His holy finger? Because if King says Kewpie, we all say Kewpie, and we all say thankya? If he’d somehow gotten the idea that the prize for ringing the Test Your Strength bell at the carnival was a Cloo pie doll, would they say Cloopie? Eddie thought the answer was yes. He thought the answer was yes just as surely as Co-Op City was in Brooklyn.

  “David Brinkley said King was fifty-two. You boys met him, so do the math. Could he have been fifty-two in the year of ‘99?”

  “You bet your purity,” Eddie said. He tossed Roland a dark, dismayed glance. “And since nineteen’s the part we keep running into—Ted Stevens Brautigan, go on, count the letters!— I bet it has to do with more than just the year. Nineteen—”

  “It’s a date,” Jake said flatly. “Sure it is. Keystone Date in Keystone Year in Keystone World. The nineteenth of something, in the year of 1999. Most likely a summer month, because he was out walking.”

  “It’s summer over there right now,” Susannah said. “It’s June. The 6-month. Turn 6 on its head and you get 9.”

  “Yeah, and spell dog backward, you get god,” Eddie said, but he sounded uneasy.