The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  “That’s just plain sil—”

  “Hush,” he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. “I…will…wait for you,” he said, forcing each word out with immense effort.

  Jake saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body’s last message to the living world, and that was when the boy’s heart finally understood what his head had known for hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and scoured. When Roland took his hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to Eddie, it could happen to anybody. It could happen to him.

  “Yes, Eddie. I know you’ll wait,” she said.

  “In…” He pulled in another of those great, wretched, rasping breaths. His eyes were as brilliant as gemstones. “In the clearing.” Another breath. Hand holding her hair. Lamplight casting them both in its mystic yellow circle. “The one at the end of the path.”

  “Yes, dear.” Her voice was calm now, but a tear fell on Eddie’s cheek and ran slowly down to the line of jaw. “I hear you very well. Wait for me and I’ll find you and we’ll go together. I’ll be walking then, on my own legs.”

  Eddie smiled at her, then turned his eyes to Jake.

  “Jake…to me.”

  No, Jake thought, panicked, no, I can’t, I can’t.

  But he was already leaning close, into that smell of the end. He could see the fine line of grit just below Eddie’s hairline turning to paste as more tiny droplets of sweat sprang up.

  “Wait for me, too,” Jake said through numb lips. “Okay, Eddie? We’ll all go on together. We’ll be ka-tet, just like we were.” He tried to smile and couldn’t. His heart hurt too much for smiling. He wondered if it might not explode in his chest, the way stones sometimes exploded in a hot fire. He had learned that little fact from his friend Benny Slightman. Benny’s death had been bad, but this was a thousand times worse. A million.

  Eddie was shaking his head. “Not…so fast, buddy.” He drew in another breath and then grimaced, as if the air had grown quills only he could feel. He whispered then—not from weakness, Jake thought later, but because this was just between them. “Watch…for Mordred. Watch…Dandelo.”

  “Dandelion? Eddie, I don’t—”

  “Dandelo.” Eyes widening. Enormous effort. “Protect…your…dinh…from Mordred. From Dandelo. You…Oy. Your job.” His eyes cut toward Roland, then back to Jake. “Shhh.” Then: “Protect…”

  “I…I will. We will.”

  Eddie nodded a little, then looked at Roland. Jake moved aside and the gunslinger leaned in for Eddie’s word to him.

  Eleven

  Never, ever, had Roland seen an eye so bright, not even on Jericho Hill, when Cuthbert had bade him a laughing goodbye.

  Eddie smiled. “We had…some times.”

  Roland nodded again.

  “You…you…” But this Eddie couldn’t finish. He raised one hand and made a weak twirling motion.

  “I danced,” Roland said, nodding. “Danced the commala.”

  Yes, Eddie mouthed, then drew in another of those whooping, painful breaths. It was the last.

  “Thank you for my second chance,” he said. “Thank you…Father.”

  That was all. Eddie’s eyes still looked at him, and they were still aware, but he had no breath to replace the one expended on that final word, that father. The lamplight gleamed on the hairs of his bare arms, turning them to gold. The thunder murmured. Then Eddie’s eyes closed and he laid his head to one side. His work was finished. He had left the path, stepped into the clearing. They sat around him a-circle, but ka-tet no more.

  Twelve

  And so, thirty minutes later.

  Roland, Jake, Ted, and Sheemie sat on a bench in the middle of the Mall. Dani Rostov and the bankerly-looking fellow were nearby. Susannah was in the bedroom of the proctor’s suite, washing her husband’s body for burial. They could hear her from where they were sitting. She was singing. All the songs seemed to be ones they’d heard Eddie singing along the trail. One was “Born to Run.” Another was “The Rice Song,” from Calla Bryn Sturgis.

  “We have to go, and right away,” Roland said. His hand had gone to his hip and was rubbing, rubbing. Jake had seen him take a bottle of aspirin (gotten God knew where) from his purse and dry-swallow three. “Sheemie, will you send us on?”

  Sheemie nodded. He had limped to the bench, leaning on Dinky for support, and still none of them had had a chance to look at the wound on his foot. His limp seemed so minor compared to their other concerns; surely if Sheemie Ruiz were to die this night it would be as a result of opening a makeshift door between Thunder-side and America. Another strenuous act of teleportation might be lethal to him—what was a sore foot compared to that?

  “I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll try my very hardest, so I will.”

  “Those who helped us look into New York will help us do this,” Ted said.

  It was Ted who had figured out how to determine the current when on America-side of the Keystone World. He, Dinky, Fred Worthington (the bankerly-looking man), and Dani Rostov had all been to New York, and were all able to summon up clear mental images of Times Square: the lights, the crowds, the movie marquees…and, most important, the giant news-ticker which broadcast the events of the day to the crowds below, making a complete circuit of Broadway and Forty-eighth Street every thirty seconds or so. The hole had opened long enough to inform them that UN forensics experts were examining supposed mass graves in Kosovo, that Vice President Gore had spent the day in New York City campaigning for President, that Roger Clemens had struck out thirteen Texas Rangers but the Yankees had still lost the night before.

  With the help of the rest, Sheemie could have held the hole open a good while longer (the others had been staring into the brilliance of that bustling New York night with a kind of hungry amazement, not Breaking now but Opening, Seeing), only there turned out to be no need for that. Following the baseball score, the date and time had gone speeding past them in brilliant yellow-green letters a story high: JUNE 18, 1999 9:19 PM.

  Jake opened his mouth to ask how they could be sure they had been looking into Keystone World, the one where Stephen King had less than a day to live, and then shut it again. The answer was in the time, stupid, as the answer always was: the numbers comprising 9:19 also added up to nineteen.

  Thirteen

  “And how long ago was it that you saw this?” Roland asked.

  Dinky calculated. “Had to’ve been five hours, at least. Based on when the change-of-shifts horn blew and the sun went out for the night.”

  Which should make it two-thirty in the morning right now on the other side, Jake calculated, counting the hours on his fingers. Thinking was hard now, even simple addition slowed by constant thoughts of Eddie, but he found he could do it if he really tried. Only you can’t depend on its only being five hours, because time goes faster on America-side. That may change now that the Breakers have quit beating up on the Beam—it may equalize—but probably not yet. Right now it’s probably still running fast.

  And it might slip.

  One minute Stephen King could be sitting in front of his typewriter in his office on the morning of June 19th, fine as paint, and the next…boom! Lying in a nearby funeral parlor that evening, eight or twelve hours gone by in a flash, his grieving family sitting in their own circle of lamplight and trying to decide what kind of service King would’ve wanted, always assuming that information wasn’t in his will; maybe even trying to decide where he’d be buried. And the Dark Tower? Stephen King’s version of the Dark Tower? Or Gan’s version, or the Prim’s version? Lost forever, all of them. And that sound you hear? Why, that must be the Crimson King, laughing and laughing and laughing from somewhere deep in the Discordia. And maybe Mordred the Spider-Boy, laughing along with him.

  For the first time since Eddie’s death, something besides grief came to the forefront of Jake’s mind. It was a faint
ticking sound, like the one the Sneetches had made when Roland and Eddie programmed them. Just before giving them to Haylis to plant, this had been. It was the sound of time, and time was not their friend.

  “He’s right,” Jake said. “We have to go while we can still do something.”

  Ted: “Will Susannah—”

  “No,” Roland said. “Susannah will stay here, and you’ll help her bury Eddie. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” Ted said. “Of course, if that’s how you’d have it.”

  “If we’re not back in…” Roland calculated, one eye squinted shut, the other looking off into the darkness. “If we’re not back by this time on the night after next, assume that we’ve come back to End-World at Fedic.” Yes, assume Fedic, Jake thought. Of course. Because what good would it do to make the other, even more logical assumption, that we’re either dead or lost between the worlds, todash forever?

  “Do’ee ken Fedic?” Roland was asking.

  “South of here, isn’t it?” asked Worthington. He had wandered over with Dani, the pre-teen girl. “Or what was south? Trampas and a few of the other can-toi used to talk of it as though it were haunted.”

  “It’s haunted, all right,” Roland said grimly. “Can you put Susannah on a train to Fedic in the event that we’re not able to come back here? I know that at least some trains must still run, because of—”

  “The Greencloaks?” Dinky said, nodding. “Or the Wolves, as you think of them. All the D-line trains still run. They’re automated.”

  “Are they monos? Do they talk?” Jake asked. He was thinking of Blaine.

  Dinky and Ted exchanged a doubtful look, then Dinky returned his attention to Jake and shrugged. “How would we know? I probably know more about D-cups than D-lines, and I think that’s true of everyone here. The Breakers, at least. I suppose some of the guards might know something more. Or that guy.” He jerked a thumb at Tassa, who was still sitting on the stoop of Warden’s House, head in hands.

  “In any case, we’ll tell Susannah to be careful,” Roland murmured to Jake. Jake nodded. He supposed that was the best they could do, but he had another question. He made a mental note to ask either Ted or Dinky, if he got a chance to do so without being overheard by Roland. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Susannah behind—every instinct of his heart cried out against it—but he knew she would refuse to leave Eddie unburied, and Roland knew it, too. They could make her come, but only by binding and gagging her, and that would only make things worse than they were already.

  “It might be,” Ted said, “that a few Breakers would be interested in taking the train-trip south with Susannah.”

  Dani nodded. “We’re not exactly loved around here for helping you out,” she said. “Ted and Dinky are getting it the worst, but somebody spit at me half an hour ago, while I was in my room, getting this.” She held up a battered-looking and clearly much-loved Pooh Bear. “I don’t think they’ll do anything while you guys are around, but after you go…” She shrugged.

  “Man, I don’t get that,” Jake said. “They’re free.”

  “Free to do what?” Dinky asked. “Think about it. Most of them were misfits on America-side. Fifth wheels. Over here we were VIPs, and we got the best of everything. Now all that’s gone. When you think about it that way, is it so hard to understand?”

  “Yes,” Jake said bluntly. He supposed he didn’t want to understand.

  “They lost something else, too,” Ted told them quietly. “There’s a novel by Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451. ‘It was a pleasure to burn’ is that novel’s first line. Well, it was a pleasure to Break, as well.”

  Dinky was nodding. So were Worthington and Dani Rostov.

  Even Sheemie was nodding his head.

  Fourteen

  Eddie lay in that same circle of light, but now his face was clean and the top sheet of the proctor’s bed had been folded neatly down to his midsection. Susannah had dressed him in a clean white shirt she’d found somewhere (in the proctor’s closet was Jake’s guess), and she must have found a razor, too, because his cheeks were smooth. Jake tried to imagine her sitting here and shaving the face of her dead husband—singing “Commala-come-come, the rice has just begun” as she did it—and at first he couldn’t. Then, all at once, the image came to him, and it was so powerful that he had to struggle once again to keep from bursting into sobs.

  She listened quietly as Roland spoke to her, sitting on the side of the bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast. To the gunslinger she looked like a shy virgin receiving a marriage proposal.

  When he had finished, she said nothing.

  “Do you understand what I’ve told you, Susannah?”

  “Yes,” she said, still without looking up. “I’m to bury my man. Ted and Dinky will help me, if only to keep their friends—” she gave this word a bitterly sarcastic little twist that actually encouraged Roland a bit; she was in there after all, it seemed “—from taking him away from me and lynching his body from a sour apple tree.”

  “And then?”

  “Either you’ll find a way to come back here and we’ll return to Fedic together, or Ted and Dinky will put me on the train and I’ll go there alone.”

  Jake didn’t just hate the cold disconnection in her voice; it terrified him, as well. “You know why we have to go back to the other side, don’t you?” he asked anxiously. “I mean, you know, don’t you?”

  “To save the writer while there’s still time.” She had picked up one of Eddie’s hands, and Jake noted with fascination that his nails were perfectly clean. What had she used to get the dirt out from beneath them, he wondered—had the proctor had one of those little nail-care gadgets, like the one his father always kept on a keychain in his pocket? “Sheemie says we’ve saved the Beam of Bear and Turtle. We think we’ve saved the rose. But there’s at least one more job to do. The writer. The lazybones writer.” Now she did look up, and her eyes flashed. Jake suddenly thought it might be good that Susannah wouldn’t be with them when—if—they met sai Stephen King.

  “You bettah save him,” she said. Both Roland and Jake could hear old sneak-thief Detta creeping into her voice. “After what’s happened today, you just bettah. And this time, Roland, you tell him not to stop with his writin. Not come hell, high water, cancer, or gangrene of the dick. Never mind worryin about the Pulitzer Prize, neither. You tell him to go on and be done with his motherfuckin story.”

  “I will pass the message on,” Roland said.

  She nodded.

  “You’ll come to us when this job is finished,” Roland said, and his voice rose just slightly on the last word, almost turning it into a question. “You’ll come with us and finish the final job, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Not because I want to—all the spit and git is out of me—but because he wanted me to.” Gently, very gently, she put Eddie’s hand back on his chest with the other one. Then she pointed a finger at Roland. The tip trembled minutely. “Just don’t start up with any of that ‘we are ka-tet, we are one from many’ crap. Because those days are gone. Ain’t they?”

  “Yes,” Roland said. “But the Tower still stands. And waits.”

  “Lost my taste for that, too, big boy.” Not quite los’ mah tase fo’ dat, too, but almost. “Tell you the truth.”

  But Jake realized that she was not telling the truth. She hadn’t lost her desire to see the Dark Tower any more than Roland had. Any more than Jake had himself. Their tet might be broken, but ka remained. And she felt it just as they did.

  Fifteen

  They kissed her (and Oy licked her face) before leaving.

  “You be careful, Jake,” Susannah said. “Come back safe, hear? Eddie would have told you the same.”

  “I know,” Jake said, and then kissed her again. He was smiling because he could hear Eddie telling him to watch his ass, it was cracked already, and starting to cry once more for the same reason. Susannah held him tight a moment longer, then let him go and turned back to her husband, lyin
g so still and cold in the proctor’s bed. Jake understood that she had little time for Jake Chambers or Jake Chambers’s grief just now. Her own was too big.

  Sixteen

  Outside the suite, Dinky waited by the door. Roland was walking on with Ted, the two of them already at the end of the corridor and deep in conversation. Jake supposed they were headed back to the Mall, where Sheemie (with a little help from the others) would attempt to send them once more to America-side. That reminded him of something.

  “The D-line trains go south,” Jake said. “Or what’s supposed to be south—is that right?”

  “More or less, partner,” Dinky said. “Some of the engines have got names, like Delicious Rain or Spirit of the Snow Country, but they’ve all got letters and numbers.”

  “Does the D stand for Dandelo?” Jake asked.

  Dinky looked at him with a puzzled frown. “Dandelo? What in the hell is that?”

  Jake shook his head. He didn’t even want to tell Dinky where he’d heard the word.

  “Well, I don’t know, not for sure,” Dinky said as they resumed walking, “but I always assumed the D stood for Discordia. Because that’s where all the trains supposedly end up, you know—somewhere deep in the universe’s baddest Badlands.”

  Jake nodded. D for Discordia. That made sense. Sort of, anyway.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Dinky said. “What’s a Dandelo?”

  “Just a word I saw written on the wall in Thunderclap Station. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  Seventeen

  Outside Corbett Hall, a delegation of Breakers waited. They looked grim and frightened. D for Dandelo, Jake thought. D for Discordia. Also D for desperate.

  Roland faced them with his arms folded over his chest. “Who speaks for you?” he asked. “If one speaks, let him come forward now, for our time here is up.”