by Stephen King
Roland shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but I’d as soon do what needs doing and then go back to where I belong.” He surveyed the hurrying throngs on the sidewalks bleakly. “If I belong anywhere.”
“You could stay at the apartment for a couple of days and rest up,” she said. “I’d stay with you.” And fuck thy brains out, do it please ya, she thought, and could not help a smile. “I mean, I know you won’t, but you need to know the offer’s open.”
He nodded. “Thankee, but there’s a woman who needs me to get back to her as soon as I can.” It felt like a lie to him, and a grotesque one at that. Based on everything that had happened, part of him thought that Susannah Dean needed Roland of Gilead back in her life almost as much as nursery bah-bos needed rat poison added to their bedtime bottles. Irene Tassenbaum accepted it, however. And part of her was actually anxious to get back to her husband. She had called him last night (using a pay phone a mile from the motel, just to be safe), and it seemed that she had finally gotten David Seymour Tassenbaum’s attention again. Based on her encounter with Roland, David’s attention was definitely second prize, but it was better than nothing, by God. Roland Deschain would vanish from her life soon, leaving her to find her way back to northern New England on her own and explain what had happened as best she could. Part of her mourned the impending loss, but she’d had enough adventure in the last forty hours or so to last her for the rest of her life, hadn’t she? And things to think about, that too. For one thing, it seemed that the world was thinner than she had ever imagined. And reality wider.
“All right,” she said. “It’s Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street you want to go to first, correct?”
“Yes.” Susannah hadn’t had a chance to tell them much about her adventures after Mia had hijacked their shared body, but the gunslinger knew there was a tall building—what Eddie, Jake, and Susannah called a skyscraper—now standing on the site of the former vacant lot, and the Tet Corporation must surely be inside. “Will we need a tack-see?”
“Can you and your furry friend walk seventeen short blocks and two or three long ones? It’s your call, but I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs.”
Roland didn’t know how long a long block or how short a short one might be, but he was more than willing to find out now that the deep pain in his right hip had departed. Stephen King had that pain now, along with the one in his smashed ribs and the right side of his split head. Roland did not envy him those pains, but at least they were back with their rightful owner.
“Let’s go,” he said.
THREE
Fifteen minutes later he stood across from the large dark structure thrusting itself at the summer sky, trying to keep his jaw from coming unhinged and perhaps dropping all the way to his chest. It wasn’t the Dark Tower, not his Dark Tower, at least (although it wouldn’t have surprised him to know there were people working in yon sky-tower—some of them readers of Roland’s adventures—who called 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza exactly that), but he had no doubt that it was the Tower’s representative in this Keystone World, just as the rose represented a field filled with them; the field he had seen in so many dreams.
He could hear the singing voices from here, even over the jostle and hum of the traffic. The woman had to call his name three times and finally tug on one sleeve to get his attention. When he turned to her—reluctantly—he saw it wasn’t the tower across the street that she was looking at (she had grown up just an hour from Manhattan and tall buildings were an old story to her) but at the pocket park on their side of the street. Her expression was delighted. “Isn’t it a beautiful little place? I must have been by this corner a hundred times and I never noticed it until now. Do you see the fountain? And the turtle sculpture?”
He did. And although Susannah hadn’t told them this part of her story, Roland knew she had been here—along with Mia, daughter of none—and sat on the bench closest to the turtle’s wet shell. He could almost see her there.
“I’d like to go in,” she said timidly. “May we? Is there time?”
“Yes,” he said, and followed her through the little iron gate.
FOUR
The pocket park was peaceful, but not entirely quiet.
“Do you hear people singing?” Mrs. Tassenbaum asked in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. “A chorus from somewhere?”
“Bet your bottom dollar,” Roland answered, and was sorry immediately. He’d learned the phrase from Eddie, and saying it hurt. He walked to the turtle and dropped on one knee to examine it more closely. There was a tiny piece gone from the beak, leaving a break like a missing tooth. On the back was a scratch in the shape of a question mark, and fading pink letters.
“What does it say?” she asked. “Something about a turtle, but that’s all I can make out.”
“‘See the TURTLE of enormous girth.’” He knew this without reading it.
“What does it mean?”
Roland stood up. “It’s too much to go into. Would you like to wait for me while I go in there?” He nodded in the direction of the tower with its black glass windows glittering in the sun.
“Yes,” she said. “I would. I’ll just sit on the bench in the sunshine and wait for you. It’s … refreshing. Does that sound crazy?”
“No,” he said. “If someone whose looks you don’t trust should speak to you, Irene—I think it unlikely, because this is a safe place, but it’s certainly possible—concentrate just as hard as you can, and call for me.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you talking ESP?”
He didn’t know what ESP stood for, but he understood what she meant, and nodded.
“You’d hear that? Hear me?”
He couldn’t say for sure that he would. The building might be equipped with damping devices, like the thinking-caps the can-toi wore, that would make it impossible.
“I might. And as I say, trouble’s unlikely. This is a safe place.”
She looked at the turtle, its shell gleaming with spray from the fountain. “It is, isn’t it?” She started to smile, then stopped. “You’ll come back, won’t you? You wouldn’t dump me without at least …” She shrugged one shoulder. The gesture made her look very young. “Without at least saying goodbye?”
“Never in life. And my business in yonder tower shouldn’t take long.” In fact it was hardly business at all … unless, that was, whoever was currently running the Tet Corporation had some with him. “We have another place to go, and it’s there Oy and I would take our leave of you.”
“Okay,” she said, and sat on the bench with the bumbler at her feet. The end of it was damp and she was wearing a new pair of slacks (bought in the same quick shopping-run that had netted Roland’s new shirt and jeans), but this didn’t bother her. They would dry quickly on such a warm, sunny day, and she found she wanted to be near the turtle sculpture. To study its tiny, timeless black eyes while she listened to those sweet voices. She thought that would be very restful. It was not a word she usually thought of in connection with New York, but this was a very un–New York place, with its feel of quiet and peace. She thought she might bring David here, that if they could sit on this bench he might hear the story of her missing three days without thinking her insane. Or too insane.
Roland started away, moving easily—moving like a man who could walk for days and weeks without ever varying his pace. I wouldn’t like to have him on my trail, she thought, and shivered a little at the idea. He reached the iron gate through which he would pass to the sidewalk, then turned to her once more. He spoke in a soft singsong.
“See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.”
Then he left her, moving swiftly and cleanly, not look
ing back. She sat on the bench and watched him wait with the others clustered on the corner for the WALK light, then cross with them, the leather bag slung over his shoulder bouncing lightly against his hip. She watched him mount the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza and disappear inside. Then she leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the voices sing. At some point she realized that at least two of the words they were singing were the ones that made her name.
FIVE
It seemed to Roland that great multitudes of folken were streaming into the building, but this was the perception of a man who had spent the latter years of his quest in mostly deserted places. If he’d come at quarter to nine, while people were still arriving, instead of at quarter to eleven, he would have been stunned by the flood of bodies. Now most of those who worked here were settled in their offices and cubicles, generating paper and bytes of information.
The lobby windows were of clear glass and at least two stories high, perhaps three. Consequently the lobby was full of light, and as he stepped inside, the grief that had possessed him ever since kneeling by Eddie in the street of Pleasantville slipped away. In here the singing voices were louder, not a chorus but a great choir. And, he saw, he wasn’t the only one who heard them. On the street, people had been hurrying with their heads down and looks of distracted concentration on their faces, as if they were deliberately not seeing the delicate and perishable beauty of the day which had been given them; in here they were helpless not to feel at least some of that to which the gunslinger was so exquisitely attuned, and which he drank like water in the desert.
As if in a dream, he drifted across the rosemarble tile, hearing the echoing clack of his bootheels, hearing the faint and shifting conversation of the Orizas in their pouch. He thought, People who work here wish they lived here. They may not know it, exactly, but they do. People who work here find excuses to work late. And they will live long and productive lives.
In the center of the high, echoing room, the expensive marble floor gave way to a square of humble dark earth. It was surrounded by ropes of wine-dark velvet, but Roland knew that even the ropes didn’t need to be there. No one would transgress that little garden, not even a suicidal can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were three dwarf palm trees, and plants he hadn’t seen since leaving Gilead: Spathiphyllum, he believed they had been called there, although they might not have the same name in this world. There were other plants as well, but only one mattered.
In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose.
It hadn’t been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in 1977, when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled with trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced the coming of Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate Associates. This building, all one hundred stories of it, had been built instead, and around the rose. Whatever business might be done here was secondary to that purpose.
2 Hammarskjöld Plaza was a shrine.
SIX
There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he drew glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself. Not for years—perhaps since his early teenage years—had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-tapping distance of him without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he surely should have—
The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had approached him was clearly surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back from the ceiling above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman’s green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in them, but still, first to be surprised, then to miss like that—
He glanced down at the woman’s feet and got at least part of the answer. She was wearing a kind of shoe he’d never seen before, something with deep foam soles and what might have been canvas uppers. Shoes that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface. As for the woman herself—
A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that he had “seen the boat she came in,” as familial resemblance was sometimes expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis; second, that a society of gunslingers was a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone World, and he had just been accosted by one of them.
And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?
“I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,” Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”
The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him … although I can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain. There’s a person who wants …” For a moment she looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “… a person who wants to palaver with you,” she finished.
“All right,” he said.
She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”
Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”
“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.” And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor—not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.
At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faintly familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ there, and easily. When he had finished, it changed back again.
“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”
She smiled—her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff—and nodded. “Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”
“Say true?”
“True.”
The lobby had regained its normal rhythm … except, Roland understood, the rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned the nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to. They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it … which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called ele-vaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfectly straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old. And it didn�
��t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.
“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”
“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”
SEVEN
The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone. He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States. It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”
“Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her. “Surely not, you’re too young. His granddaughter?”
Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain. I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who mostly raised me.”
“Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.
“As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning. “Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A little frightened, but pleased.”
