by Stephen King
RESPONSE: Commala-come-ten!
She is not your friend!
If you let her get too close
She’ll cut you up again.
11th Stanza: The Writer
One
By the time they reached the little shopping center in the town of Bridgton—a supermarket, a laundry, and a surprisingly large drugstore—both Roland and Eddie sensed it: not just the singing, but the gathering power. It lifted them up like some crazy, wonderful elevator. Eddie found himself thinking of Tinkerbell’s magic dust and Dumbo’s magic feather. This was like drawing near the rose and yet not like that. There was no sense of holiness or sanctification in this little New England town, butsomething was going on here, and it was powerful.
Driving here from East Stoneham, following the signs to Bridgton from back road to back road, Eddie had sensed something else, as well: the unbelievablecrispness of this world. The summer-green depths of the pine forests had a validity he had never encountered before, never even suspected. The birds which flew across the sky fair stopped his breath for wonder, even the most common sparrow. The very shadows on the ground seemed to have a velvety thickness, as if you could reach down, pick them up, and carry them away under your arm like pieces of carpet, if you so chose.
At some point, Eddie asked Roland if he felt any of this.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I feel it, see it, hear it…Eddie, Itouch it.”
Eddie nodded. He did, too. This world was real beyond reality. It was…anti-todash. That was the best he could do. And they were very much in the heart of the Beam. Eddie could feel it carrying them on like a river rushing down a gorge toward a waterfall.
“But I’m afraid,” Roland said. “I feel as though we’re approaching the center of everything—the Tower itself, mayhap. It’s as if, after all these years, the quest itself has become the point for me, and the end is frightening.”
Eddie nodded. He could get behind that. Certainly he was afraid. If it wasn’t the Tower putting out that stupendous force, then it was some potent and terrible thing akin to the rose. But not quite the same. Atwin to the rose? That could be right.
Roland looked out at the parking lot and the people who came and went beneath a summer sky filled with fat, slow-floating clouds, seemingly unaware that the whole world was singing with power around them, and that all the clouds flowed along the same ancient pathway in the heavens. They were unaware of their own beauty.
The gunslinger said, “I used to think the most terrible thing would be to reach the Dark Tower and find the top room empty. The God of all universes either dead or nonexistent in the first place. But now…suppose thereis someone there, Eddie? Someone in charge who turns out to be…” He couldn’t finish.
Eddie could. “Someone who turns out to be just another bumhug? Is that it? God not dead but feeble-minded and malicious?”
Roland nodded. This was not, in fact, precisely what he was afraid of, but he thought Eddie had at least come close.
“How can that be, Roland? Considering what we feel?”
Roland shrugged, as if to say anything could be.
“In any case, what choice do we have?”
“None,” Roland said bleakly. “All things serve the Beam.”
Whatever the great and singing force was, it seemed to be coming from the road that ran west from the shopping center, back into the woods. Kansas Road, according to the sign, and that made Eddie think of Dorothy and Toto and Blaine the Mono.
He dropped the transmission of their borrowed Ford into Drive and started rolling forward. His heart was beating in his chest with slow, exclamatory force. He wondered if Moses had felt like this when he approached the burning bush which contained God. He wondered if Jacob had felt like this, awakening to find a stranger, both radiant and fair, in his camp—the angel with whom he would wrestle. He thought that they probably had. He felt sure that another part of their journey was about to come to an end—another answer lay up ahead.
God living on Kansas Road, in the town of Bridgton, Maine? It should have sounded crazy, but didn’t.
Just don’t strike me dead,Eddie thought, and turned west.I need to get back to my sweetheart, so please don’t strike me dead, whoever or whatever you are.
“Man, I’m so scared,” he said.
Roland reached out and briefly grasped his hand.
Two
Three miles from the shopping center, they came to a dirt road which struck off into the pine trees on their left. There had been other byways, which Eddie had passed without slowing from the steady thirty miles an hour he had been maintaining, but at this one he stopped.
Both front windows were down. They could hear the wind in the trees, the grouchy call of a crow, the not-too-distant buzz of a powerboat, and the rumble of the Ford’s engine. Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds. The sign marking the turnoff said no more than PRIVATE DRIVE. Nevertheless, Eddie was nodding.
“This is it.”
“Yes, I know. How’s your leg?”
“Hurts. Don’t worry about it. Are we gonna do this?”
“Wehave to,” Roland said. “You were right to bring us here. What’s here is the other half ofthis. ” He tapped the paper in his pocket, the one conveying ownership of the vacant lot to the Tet Corporation.
“You think this guy King is the rose’s twin.”
“You say true.” Roland smiled at his own choice of words. Eddie thought he’d rarely seen one so sad. “We’ve picked up the Calla way of talking, haven’t we? Jake first, then all of us. But that will fall away.”
“Further to go,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.
“Aye, and it will be dangerous. Still…maybe nothing so dangerous as this. Shall we roll?”
“In a minute. Roland, do you remember Susannah mentioning a man named Moses Carver?”
“A stem…which is to say a man of affairs. He took over her father’s business when sai Holmes died, am I correct?”
“Yeah. He was also Suze’s godfather. She said he could be trusted completely. Remember how mad she got at Jake and me when we suggested he might have stolen the company’s money?”
Roland nodded.
“I trust her judgment,” Eddie said. “What about you?”
“Yes.”
“If Carveris honest, we might be able to put him in charge of the things we need to accomplish in this world.”
None of this seemed terribly important compared to the force Eddie felt rising all around him, but he thought it was. They might only have one chance to protect the rose now and ensure its survival later. They had to do it right, and Eddie knew that meant heeding the will of destiny.
In a word, ka.
“Suze says Holmes Dental was worth eight or ten million when you snatched her out of New York, Roland. If Carver’s as good as I hope he is, the company might be worth twelve or fourteen million by now.”
“That’s a lot?”
“Delah,” Eddie said, tossing his open hand at the horizon, and Roland nodded. “It sounds funny to talk about using the profits from some kind of dental process to save the universe, but that’s just what Iam talking about. And the money the tooth-fairy left her may only be the beginning. Microsoft, for instance. Remember me mentioning that name to Tower?”
Roland nodded. “Slow down, Eddie.Calm down, I beg.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and pulled in a deep breath. “It’s this place. The singing. Thefaces …do you see the faces in the trees? In the shadows?”
“I see them very well.”
“It makes me feel a little crazy. Bear with me. What I’m talking about is merging Holmes Dental and the Tet Corporation, then using our knowledge of the future to turn it into one of the richest combinations in the history of the world. Resources to equal those of the Sombra Corporation…or maybe North Central Positronics itself.”
Roland shrugged, then lifted a hand as if to ask how Eddie could talk about money while in the presence of the i
mmense force flowing along the barrel of the Beam and through them, lifting the hair from the napes of their necks, making their sinuses tingle, turning every woodsy shadow into a watching face…as if a multitude had gathered here to watch them play out a crucial scene in their drama.
“I know how you feel, but itmatters, ” Eddie insisted. “Believe me, it does. Suppose, for instance, we were to grow fast enough to buy out North Central Positronics before it can rise as a force in this world? Roland, we might be able to turn it, the way you can turn even the biggest river with no more than a single spade up in its headwaters, where it’s only a trickle.”
At this Roland’s eyes gleamed. “Take it over,” he said. “Turn its purpose from the Crimson King’s to our own. Yes, that might be possible.”
“Whether it is or isn’t, we have to remember that we’re not just playing for 1977, or 1987, where I came from, or 1999, where Suze went.” In that world, Eddie realized, Calvin Tower might be dead and Aaron Deepneau would be for sure, their final action in the Dark Tower’s drama—saving Donald Callahan from the Hitler Brothers—long finished. Swept from the stage, both of them. Into the clearing at the end of the path along with Gasher and Hoots, Benny Slightman, Susan Delgado
(Calla, Callahan, Susan, Susannah)
and the Tick-Tock Man, even Blaine and Patricia. Roland and his ka-tet would also pass into that clearing, be it early or late. In the end—if they were fantastically lucky and suicidally brave—only the Dark Tower would stand. If they could nip North Central Positronics in the bud, they might be able to save all the Beams that had been broken. Even if they failed at that, two Beams might be enough to hold the Tower in place: the rose in New York and a man named Stephen King in Maine. Eddie’s head had no proof that this was indeed the case…but his heart believed it.
“What we’re playing for, Roland, is the ages.”
Roland made a fist and thumped it lightly on the dusty dashboard of John Cullum’s old Ford and nodded.
“Anything can go on that lot, you realize that?Anything. A building, a park, a monument, The National Gramophone Institute. As long as the rose stays. This guy Carver can make the Tet Corporation legal, maybe working with Aaron Deepneau—”
“Yes,” Roland said. “I liked Deepneau. He had a true face.”
Eddie thought so, too. “Anyway, they can draw up legal papers that take care of the rose—the rose always stays, no matter what. And I’ve got a feeling that it will. 2007, 2057, 2525, 3700…hell, the year 19,000…I think it’ll always be there. Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal. We have to do it right while we have the chance, though. Because this is the key world. In this one you never get a chance to whittle a little more if the key doesn’t turn. In this world I don’t think there are any do-overs.”
Roland considered this, then pointed to the dirt road leading into the trees. Into a forest of watching faces and singing voices. A harmonium of all that filled life with worth and meaning, that held to the truth, that acknowledged the White. “And what about the man who lives at the end of this road, Eddie? If heis a man.”
“I think he is, and not just because of what John Cullum said. It’s what I feel here.” Eddie patted his chest above the heart.
“So do I.”
“Do you say so, Roland?”
“Aye, I do. Ishe immortal, do you think? Because I’ve seen much in my years, and heard rumors of much more, but never of a man or woman who lived forever.”
“I don’t think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some storiesdo live forever.”
Understanding lit up Roland’s eyes.At last, Eddie thought.At last he sees it.
But how long had it taken him to see it himself, and then to swallow it? God knew he should have been able to, after all the other wonders he’d seen, and yet still this last step had eluded him. Even discovering that Pere Callahan had seemingly sprung alive and breathing from a fiction called’Salem’s Lot hadn’t been enough to take him that last crucial step. What had finally done it was finding out that Co-Op City was in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. In this world, at least. Which was the only world that mattered.
“Maybe he’s not at home,” Roland said as around them the whole world waited. “Maybe this man who made us is not at home.”
“You know he is.”
Roland nodded. And the old light had dawned in his eyes, light from a fire that had never gone out, the one that had lit his way along the Beam all the way from Gilead.
“Then drive on!” he cried hoarsely. “Drive on, for your father’s sake! If he’s God—our God—I’d look Him in the eye and ask Him the way to the Tower!”
“Would you not ask him the way to Susannah, first?”
As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Eddie regretted it and prayed the gunslinger would not answer it.
Roland didn’t. He only twirled the remaining fingers on his right hand:Go, go.
Eddie put the gearshift of Cullum’s Ford into Drive and turned onto the dirt road. He drove them into a great singing force that seemed to go through them like a wind, turning them into something as insubstantial as a thought, or a dream in the head of some sleeping god.
Three
A quarter of a mile in, the road forked. Eddie took the lefthand branch, although the sign pointing that way said ROW-DEN, not KING. The dust raised by their passage hung in the rearview mirror. The singing was a sweet din, pouring through him like liquor. His hair was still standing up at the roots, and his muscles were trembling. Called upon to draw his gun, Eddie thought he would probably drop the damned thing. Even if he managed to hold onto it, aiming would be impossible. He didn’t know how the man they were looking for could live so close to the sound of that singing and eat or sleep, let alone write stories. But of course King wasn’t justclose to the sound; if Eddie had it right, King was thesource of the sound.
But if he has a family, what about them? And even if he doesn’t, what about the neighbors?
Here was a driveway on the right, and—
“Eddie, stop.” It was Roland, but not sounding the least bit like himself. His Calla tan was thin paint over an immense pallor.
Eddie stopped. Roland fumbled at the doorhandle on his side, couldn’t make it work, levered himself out the window all the way to his waist instead (Eddie heard the chink his belt buckle made on the chrome strip which faced the window-well), and then vomited onto the oggan. When he fell back into the seat, he looked both exhausted and exalted. The eyes which rolled to meet Eddie’s were blue, ancient, glittering. “Drive on.”
“Roland, are you sure—”
Roland only twirled his fingers, looking straight out through the Ford’s dusty windshield.Go, go. For your father’s sake!
Eddie drove on.
Four
It was the sort of house real-estate agents call a ranch. Eddie wasn’t surprised. Whatdid surprise him a little was how modest the place was. Then he reminded himself that not every writer was arich writer, and that probably went double foryoung writers. Some sort of typo had apparently made his second novel quite the catch among bibliomaniacs, but Eddie doubted if King ever saw a commission on that sort of thing. Or royalties, if that was what they called it.
Still, the car parked in the turnaround driveway was a new-looking Jeep Cherokee with a nifty Indian stripe running up the side, and that suggested Stephen King wasn’t exactly starving for his art, either. There was a wooden jungle gym in the front yard with a lot of plastic toys scattered around it. Eddie’s heart sank at the sight of them. One lesson which the Calla had taught exquisitely was that kids complicated things. The ones living here werelittle kids, from the look of the toys. And to them comes a pair of men wearing hard calibers. Men who were not, at this point in time, strictly in their right minds.
Eddie cut the Ford’s engine. A crow cawed. A powerboat—bigger than the one they’d heard earlier, from the sound—buzzed. Beyond the house, bright sun glinted on blue water. An
d the voices sangCome, come, come-come-commala.
There was a clunk as Roland opened his door and got out, slewing a little as he did so: bad hip, dry twist. Eddie got out on legs that felt as numb as sticks.
“Tabby? That you?”
This from around the right side of the house. And now, running ahead of the voice and the man who owned the voice, came a shadow. Never had Eddie seen one that so filled him with terror and fascination. He thought, and with absolute certainty:Yonder comes my maker. Yonder is he, aye, say true. And the voices sang,Commala-come-three, he who made me.
“Did you forget something, darling?” Only the last word came out in a downeast drawl,daaa-lin, the way John Cullum would have said it. And then came the man of the house, then came he. He saw them and stopped. He sawRoland and stopped. The singing voices stopped with him, and the powerboat’s drone seemed to stop as well. For a moment the whole world hung on a hinge. Then the man turned and ran. Not, however, before Eddie saw the terrible thunder-struck look of recognition on his face.
Roland was after him in a flash, like a cat after a bird.
Five
But sai King was a man, not a bird. He couldn’t fly, and there was really nowhere to run. The side lawn sloped down a mild hill broken only by a concrete pad that might have been the well or some kind of sewage-pumping device. Beyond the lawn was a postage stamp—sized bit of beach, littered with more toys. After that came the lake. The man reached the edge of it, splashed into it, then turned so awkwardly he almost fell down.
Roland skidded to a stop on the sand. He and Stephen King regarded each other. Eddie stood perhaps ten yards behind Roland, watching both of them. The singing had begun again, and so had the buzzing drone of the powerboat. Perhaps they had never stopped, but Eddie believed he knew better.
The man in the water put his hands over his eyes like a child. “You’re not there,” he said.
“I am, sai.” Roland’s voice was both gentle and filled with awe. “Take your hands from your eyes, Stephen of Bridgton. Take them down and see me very well.”
