by Stephen King
“How far from here to Turtleback Lane?” Roland rapped at the storekeeper.
The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror. Never in his life had Roland felt more like shooting a man … or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.
Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke. She was looking up at Roland and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. “That’s in Lovell, mister. It’s about five miles from here.”
One look in her eyes—large and brown, fearful but not panicky—and Roland decided this was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was—
He turned to Jake. “Can you drive the shopkeeper’s truck five miles?”
Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn’t afford to risk ultimate failure by trying to do a thing he—city boy that he was—had never done in his life.
“No,” Jake said. “I don’t think so. What about you?” Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum’s car. It didn’t look that hard … but there was his hip to consider. Rosa had told him that dry twist moved fast—like a fire driven by strong winds, she’d said—and now he knew what she’d meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He’d watched how Eddie manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up and the one that made it slow down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of the right hip was always rolling in its socket.
He didn’t think he could do that. Not with any degree of safety.
“I think not,” he said. He took the keys from the shopkeeper, then looked at the woman lying in front of the meat-counter. “Stand up, sai,” he said.
Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on her feet, Roland gave her the keys. I keep meeting useful people in here, he thought. If this one’s as good as Cullum turned out to be, we might still be all right.
“You’re going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell,” Roland said.
“To Turtleback Lane,” she said.
“You say true, I say thankya.”
“Are you going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?”
“Not unless you dawdle,” Roland said.
She considered this, then nodded. “Then I won’t. Let’s go.”
“Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum,” the shopkeeper told her faintly as she started for the door.
“If I don’t come back,” she said, “you just remember one thing: it was my husband who invented the Internet—him and his friends, partly at CalTech and partly in their own garages. Not Albert Gore.”
Roland’s stomach rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed away from him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman’s pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth. The rest he handed to Jake, who ate two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the meat with great interest.
“I’ll give you your share when we get in the truck,” Jake promised.
“Ruck,” Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis: “Share!”
“Holy jumping Jesus Christ,” the shopkeeper said.
FOUR
The Yankee shopkeeper’s accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn’t. It was a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn’t driven a standard since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had never driven one of those.
Jake was sitting beside her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing turkey) on his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain in his leg. Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition. The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake’s lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey along with a word he had learned from Eddie.
Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. “Did that creature just say fuck, young man?”
“Never mind what he said,” Jake replied. His voice was shaking. The hands of the Boar’s Head clock in the window now stood at five to four. Like Roland, the boy had never had a sense of time as a thing so little in their control. “Use the clutch and get us out of here.”
Luckily, the shifting pattern had been embossed on the head of the stick shift and was still faintly visible. Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch with a sneakered foot, ground the gears hellishly, and finally found Reverse. The truck backed out onto Route 7 in a series of jerks, then stalled halfway across the white line. She turned the ignition key, realizing she’d once more forgotten the clutch just a little too late to prevent another series of those spastic leaps. Roland and Jake were now bracing their hands against the dusty metal dashboard, where a faded sticker proclaimed AMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE! in red white and blue. This series of jerks was actually a good thing, for at that moment a truck loaded with logs—it was impossible for Roland not to think of the one that had crashed the last time they’d been here—crested the rise to the north of the store. Had the pickup not jerked its way back into the General Store’s parking lot (bashing the fender of a parked car as it came to a stop), they would have been centerpunched. And very likely killed. The logging truck swerved, horn blaring, rear wheels spuming up dust.
The creature in the boy’s lap—it looked to Mrs. Tassenbaum like some weird mixture of dog and raccoon—barked again.
Fuck. She was almost sure of it.
The storekeeper and the other patrons were lined up on the other side of the glass, and she suddenly knew what a fish in an aquarium must feel like.
“Lady, can you drive this thing or not?” the boy yelled. He had some sort of bag over his shoulder. It reminded her of a newsboy’s bag, only it was leather instead of canvas and there appeared to be plates inside.
“I can drive it, young man, don’t you worry.” She was terrified, and yet at the same time … was she enjoying this? She almost thought she was. For the last eighteen years she’d been little more than the great David Tassenbaum’s ornament, a supporting character in his increasingly famous life, the lady who said “Try one of these” as she passed around hors d’oeuvres at parties. Now, suddenly, she was at the center of something, and she had an idea it was something very important indeed.
“Take a deep breath,” said the man with the hard sunburned face. His brilliant blue eyes fastened upon hers, and when they did it was hard to think of anything else. Also, the sensation was pleasant. If this is hypnosis, she thought, they ought to teach it in the public schools. “Hold it, then let it out. And then drive us, for your father’s sake.”
She pulled in a deep breath as instructed, and suddenly the day seemed brighter—nearly brilliant. And she could hear faint singing voices. Lovely voices. Was the truck’s radio on, tuned to some opera program? No time to check. But it was nice, whatever it was. As calming as the deep breath.
Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch and restarted the engine. This time she found Reverse on the first try and backed into the road almost smoothly. Her first effort at a forward gear netted her Second instead of First and the truck almost stalled when she eased the clutch out, but then the engine seemed to take pity on her. With a wheeze of loose pistons and a manic rapping from beneath the hood, they began rolling north toward the Stoneham-Lovell line.
“Do you know where Turtleback Lane is?” Roland asked her. Ahead of them, near a sign marked MILLION DOLLAR CAMPGROUND, a battered blue minivan swung out onto the road.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re s
ure?” The last thing the gunslinger wanted was to waste precious time casting about for the back road where King lived.
“Yes. We have friends who live there. The Beckhardts.”
For a moment Roland could only grope, knowing he’d heard the name but not where. Then he got it. Beckhardt was the name of the man who owned the cabin where he and Eddie had had their final palaver with John Cullum. He felt a fresh stab of grief in his heart at the thought of Eddie as he’d been on that thundery afternoon, still so strong and vital.
“All right,” he said. “I believe you.”
She glanced at him across the boy sitting between. “You’re in one hell of a hurry, mister—like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. What very important date are you almost too late for?”
Roland shook his head. “Never mind, just drive.” He looked at the clock on the dashboard, but it didn’t work, had stopped in the long-ago with the hands pointed at (of course) 9:19. “It may not be too late yet,” he said, while ahead of them, unheeded, the blue van began to pull away. It strayed across the white line of Route 7 into the southbound lane and Mrs. Tassenbaum almost committed a bon mot—something about people who started drinking before five—but then the blue van pulled back into the northbound lane, breasted the next hill, and was gone toward the town of Lovell.
Mrs. Tassenbaum forgot about it. She had more interesting things to think about. For instance—
“You don’t have to answer what I’m going to ask now if you don’t want to,” she said, “but I admit that I’m curious: are you boys walkins?”
FIVE
Bryan Smith has spent the last couple of nights—along with his rottweilers, litter-twins he has named Bullet and Pistol—in the Million Dollar Campground, just over the Lovell-Stoneham line. It’s nice there by the river (the locals call the rickety wooden structure spanning the water Million Dollar Bridge, which Bryan understands is a joke, and a pretty funny one, by God). Also, folks—hippie-types down from the woods in Sweden, Harrison, and Waterford, mostly—sometimes show up there with drugs to sell. Bryan likes to get mellow, likes to get down, may it do ya, and he’s down this Saturday afternoon … not a lot, not the way he likes, but enough to give him a good case of the munchies. They have those Marses’ Bars at the Center Lovell Store. Nothing better for the munchies than those.
He pulls out of the campground and onto Route 7 without so much as a glance in either direction, then says “Whoops, forgot again!” No traffic, though. Later on—especially after the Fourth of July and until Labor Day—there’ll be plenty of traffic to contend with, even out here in the boonies, and he’ll probably stay closer to home. He knows he isn’t much of a driver; one more speeding ticket or fender-bender and he’ll probably lose his license for six months. Again.
No problem this time, though; nothing coming but an old pick-emup, and that baby’s almost half a mile back.
“Eat my dust, cowboy!” he says, and giggles. He doesn’t know why he said cowboy when the word in his mind was muthafuckah, as in eat my dust muthafuckah, but it sounds good. It sounds right. He sees he’s drifted into the other lane and corrects his course. “Back on the road again!” he cries, and lets loose another highpitched giggle. Back on the road again is a good one, and he always uses it on girls. Another good one is when you twist the wheel from side to side, making your car loop back and forth, and you say Ahh jeez, musta had too much cough-syrup! He knows lots of lines like this, even once thought of writing a book called Crazy Road Jokes, wouldn’t that be a sketch, Bryan Smith writing a book just like that guy King over in Lovell!
He turns on the radio (the van yawing onto the soft shoulder to the left of the tarvy, throwing up a rooster-tail of dust, but not quite running into the ditch) and gets Steely Dan, singing “Hey Nineteen.” Good one! Yassuh, wicked good one! He drives a little faster in response to the music. He looks into the rearview mirror and sees his dogs, Bullet and Pistol, looking over the rear seat, bright-eyed. For a moment Bryan thinks they’re looking at him, maybe thinking what a good guy he is, then wonders how he can be so stupid. There’s a Styrofoam cooler behind the driver’s seat, and a pound of fresh hamburger in it. He means to cook it later over a campfire back at Million Dollar. Yes, and a couple more Marses’ Bars for dessert, by the hairy old Jesus! Marses’ Bars are wicked good!
“You boys ne’mine that cooler,” Bryan Smith says, speaking to the dogs he can see in the rearview mirror. This time the minivan pitches instead of yawing, crossing the white line as it climbs a blind grade at fifty miles an hour. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your point of view—nothing is coming the other way; nothing puts a stop to Bryan Smith’s northward progress.
“You ne’mine that hamburg, that’s my supper.” He says suppah, as John Cullum would, but the face looking back at the bright-eyed dogs from the rearview mirror is the face of Sheemie Ruiz. Almost exactly.
Sheemie could be Bryan Smith’s litter-twin.
SIX
Irene Tassenbaum was driving the truck with more assurance now, standard shift or not. She almost wished she didn’t have to turn right a quarter of a mile from here, because that would necessitate using the clutch again, this time to downshift. But that was Turtleback Lane right up ahead, and Turtleback was where these boys wanted to go.
Walkins! They said so, and she believed it, but who else would? Chip McAvoy, maybe, and surely the Reverend Peterson from that crazy Church of the WalkIns down in Stoneham Corners, but anyone else? Her husband, for instance? Nope. Never. If you couldn’t engrave a thing on a microchip, David Tassenbaum didn’t believe it was real. She wondered—not for the first time lately—if forty-seven was too old to think about a divorce.
She shifted back to Second without grinding the gears too much, but then, as she turned off the highway, had to shift all the way down to First when the silly old pickup began to grunt and chug. She thought that one of her passengers would make some sort of smart comment (perhaps the boy’s mutant dog would even say fuck again), but all the man in the passenger seat said was, “This doesn’t look the same.”
“When were you here last?” Irene Tassenbaum asked him. She considered shifting up to second gear again, then decided to leave things just as they were. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” David liked to say.
“It’s been awhile,” the man admitted. She had to keep sneaking glances at him. There was something strange and exotic about him—especially his eyes. It was as if they’d seen things she’d never even dreamed of.
Stop it, she told herself. He’s probably a drugstore cowboy all the way from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
But she kind of doubted that. The boy was odd, as well— him and his exotic crossbreed dog—but they were nothing compared to the man with the haggard face and the strange blue eyes.
“Eddie said it was a loop,” the boy said. “Maybe last time you guys came in from the other end.”
The man considered this and nodded. “Would the other end be the Bridgton end?” he asked the woman.
“Yes indeed.”
The man with the odd blue eyes nodded. “We’re going to the writer’s house.”
“Cara Laughs,” she said at once. “It’s a beautiful house. I’ve seen it from the lake, but I don’t know which driveway—”
“It’s nineteen,” the man said. They were currently passing the one marked 27. From this end of Turtleback Lane, the numbers would go down rather than up.
“What do you want with him, if I may I be so bold?”
It was the boy who answered. “We want to save his life.”
SEVEN
Roland recognized the steeply descending driveway at once, even though he’d last seen it under black, thundery skies, and much of his attention had been taken by the brilliant flying taheen. There was no sign of taheen or other exotic wildlife today. The roof of the house below had been dressed with copper instead of shingles at some point during the intervening years, and the wooded area beyond it had become a lawn, but the driveway was
the same, with a sign reading CARA LAUGHS on the lefthand side and one bearing the number 19 in large numerals on the right. Beyond was the lake, sparkling blue in the strong afternoon light.
From the lawn came the blat of a hard-working small engine. Roland looked at Jake and was dismayed by the boy’s pale cheeks and wide, frightened eyes.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“He’s not here, Roland. Not him, not any of his family. Just the man cutting the grass.”
“Nonsense, you can’t—” Mrs. Tassenbaum began.
“I know!” Jake shouted at her. “I know, lady!”
Roland was looking at Jake with a frank and horrified sort of fascination … but in his current state, the boy either did not understand the look or missed it entirely.
Why are you lying, Jake? the gunslinger thought. And then, on the heels of that: He’s not.
“What if it’s already happened?” Jake demanded, and yes, he was worried about King, but Roland didn’t think that was all he was worried about. “What if he’s dead and his family’s not here because the police called them, and—”
“It hasn’t happened,” Roland said, but that was all of which he was sure. What do you know, Jake, and why won’t you tell me?
There was no time to wonder about it now.
EIGHT
The man with the blue eyes sounded calm as he spoke to the boy, but he didn’t look calm to Irene Tassenbaum; not at all. And those singing voices she’d first noticed outside the East Stoneham General Store had changed. Their song was still sweet, but wasn’t there a note of desperation in it now, as well? She thought so. A high, pleading quality that made her temples throb.
