by Stephen King
“And you’d never betray your quest.”
“Renounce the Tower? No, Eddie. Not that, not ever. Tell me your dream.”
Eddie did, omitting nothing. When he had finished, Roland looked down at his guns, frowning. They seemed to have reassembled themselves while Eddie was talking.
“So what does it mean, that I saw you driving that ’dozer at the end? That I still don’t trust you? That subconsciously—”
“Is this ology-of-the-psyche? The cabala I have heard you and Susannah speak of?”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“It’s shit,” Roland said dismissively. “Mudpies of the mind. Dreams either mean nothing or everything—and when they mean everything, they almost always come as messages from . . . well, from other levels of the Tower.” He gazed at Eddie shrewdly. “And not all messages are sent by friends.”
“Something or someone is fucking with my head? Is that what you mean?”
“I think it possible. But you must watch me all the same. I bear watching, as you well know.”
“I trust you,” Eddie said, and the very awkwardness with which he spoke lent his words sincerity. Roland looked touched, almost shaken, and Eddie wondered how he ever could have thought this man an emotionless robot. Roland might be a little short on imagination, but he had feelings, all right.
“One thing about your dream concerns me very much, Eddie.”
“The bulldozer?”
“The machine, yes. The threat to the rose.”
“Jake saw the rose, Roland. It was fine.”
Roland nodded. “In his when, the when of that particular day, the rose was thriving. But that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so. If the construction the sign spoke of comes . . . if the bulldozer comes . . .”
“There are other worlds than these,” Eddie said. “Remember?”
“Some things may exist only in one. In one where, in one when.” Roland lay down and looked up at the stars. “We must protect that rose,” he said. “We must protect it at all costs.”
“You think it’s another door, don’t you? One that opens on the Dark Tower.”
The gunslinger looked at him from eyes that ran with starshine. “I think it may be the Tower,” he said. “And if it’s destroyed—”
His eyes closed. He said no more.
Eddie lay awake late.
11
The new day dawned clear and bright and cold. In the strong morning sunlight, the thing Eddie had spotted the evening before was more clearly visible . . . but he still couldn’t tell what it was. Another riddle, and he was getting damned sick of them.
He stood squinting at it, shading his eyes from the sun, with Susannah on one side of him and Jake on the other. Roland was back by the campfire, packing what he called their gunna, a word which seemed to mean all their worldly goods. He appeared not to be concerned with the thing up ahead, or to know what it was.
How far away? Thirty miles? Fifty? The answer seemed to depend on how far could you see in all this flat land, and Eddie didn’t know the answer. One thing he felt quite sure of was that Jake had been right on at least two counts—it was some kind of building, and it sprawled across all four lanes of the highway. It must; how else could they see it? It would have been lost in the thinny . . . wouldn’t it?
Maybe it’s standing in one of those open patches—what Suze calls “the holes in the clouds.” Or maybe the thinny ends before we get that far. Or maybe it’s a goddam hallucination. In any case, you might as well put it out of your mind for the time being. Got a little more turnpikin’ to do.
Still, the building held him. It looked like an airy Arabian Nights confection of blue and gold . . . except Eddie had an idea that the blue was stolen from the sky and the gold from the newly risen sun.
“Roland, come here a second!”
At first he didn’t think the gunslinger would, but then Roland cinched a rawhide lace on Susannah’s pack, rose, put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, and walked over to them.
“Gods, one would think no one in this band has the wit to housekeep but me,” Roland said.
“We’ll pitch in,” Eddie said, “we always do, don’t we? But look at that thing first.”
Roland did, but only with a quick glance, as if he did not even want to acknowledge it.
“It’s glass, isn’t it?” Eddie asked.
Roland took another brief look. “I wot,” he said, a phrase which seemed to mean Reckon so, partner.
“We’ve got lots of glass buildings where I come from, but most of them are office buildings. That thing up ahead looks more like something from Disney World. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you want to look at it?” Susannah asked.
Roland did take another look at the distant blaze of light on glass, but once again it was quick—little more than a peek.
“Because it’s trouble,” Roland said, “and it’s in our road. We’ll get there in time. No need to live in trouble until trouble comes.”
“Will we get there today?” Jake asked.
Roland shrugged, his face still closed. “There’ll be water if God wills it,” he said.
“Christ, you could have made a fortune writing fortune cookies,” Eddie said. He hoped for a smile, at least, but got none. Roland simply walked back across the road, dropped to one knee, shouldered his purse and his pack, and waited for the others. When they were ready, the pilgrims resumed their walk east along Interstate 70. The gunslinger led, walking with his head down and his eyes on the toes of his boots.
12
Roland was quiet all day, and as the building ahead of them neared (trouble, and in our road, he had said), Susannah came to realize it wasn’t grumpiness they were seeing, or worry about anything which lay any farther ahead of them than tonight. It was the story he’d promised to tell them that Roland was thinking about, and he was a lot more than worried.
By the time they stopped for their noon meal, they could clearly see the building ahead—a many-turreted palace which appeared to be made entirely of reflective glass. The thinny lay close around it, but the palace rose serenely above all, its turrets trying for the sky. Madly strange here in the flat countryside of eastern Kansas, of course it was, but Susannah thought it the most beautiful building she had ever seen in her life; even more beautiful than the Chrysler Building, and that was going some.
As they drew closer, she found it more and more difficult to look elsewhere. Watching the reflections of the puffy clouds sailing across the glass castle’s blue-sky wains and walls was like watching some splendid illusion . . . yet there was a solidity to it, as well. An inarguability. Some of that was probably just the shadow it threw—mirages did not, so far as she knew, create shadows—but not all. It just was. She had no idea what such a fabulosity was doing out here in the land of Stuckey’s and Hardee’s (not to mention Boing Boing Burgers), but there it was. She reckoned that time would tell the rest.
13
They made camp in silence, watched Roland build the wooden chimney that would be their fire in silence, then sat before it in silence, watching the sunset turn the huge glass edifice ahead of them into a castle of fire. Its towers and battlements glowed first a fierce red, then orange, then a gold which cooled rapidly to ocher as Old Star appeared in the firmament above them—
No, she thought in Detta’s voice. Ain’t dat one, girl. Not ’tall. That’s the North Star. Same one you seen back home, sittin on yo’ daddy’s lap.
But it was Old Star she wanted, she discovered; Old Star and Old Mother. She was astounded to find herself homesick for Roland’s world, and then wondered why she should be so surprised. It was a world, after all, where no one had called her a nigger bitch (at least not yet), a world where she had found someone to love . . . and made good friends as well. That last made her feel a little bit like crying, and she hugged Jake to her. He let himself be hugged, smiling, his eyes half-closed. At some distance, unpleasant but bear
able even without bullet earplugs, the thinny warbled its moaning song.
When the last traces of yellow began to fade from the castle up the road, Roland left them to sit in the turnpike travel lane and returned to his fire. He cooked more leaf-wrapped deermeat, and handed the food around. They ate in silence (Roland actually ate almost nothing, Susannah observed). By the time they were finished, they could see the Milky Way scattered across the walls of the castle ahead of them, fierce points of reflection that burned like fire in still water.
Eddie was the one who finally broke the silence. “You don’t have to,” he said. “You’re excused. Or absolved. Or whatever the hell it is you need to take that look off your face.”
Roland ignored him. He drank, tilting the waterskin up on his elbow like some hick drinking moonshine from a jug, head back, eyes on the stars. The last mouthful he spat to the roadside.
“Life for your crop,” Eddie said. He did not smile.
Roland said nothing, but his cheek went pale, as if he had seen a ghost. Or heard one.
14
The gunslinger turned to Jake, who looked back at him seriously. “I went through the trial of manhood at the age of fourteen, the youngest of my ka-tel—of my class, you would say—and perhaps the youngest ever. I told you some of that, Jake. Do you remember?”
You told all of us some of that, Susannah thought, but kept her mouth shut, and warned Eddie with her eyes to do the same. Roland hadn’t been himself during that telling; with Jake both dead and alive within his head, the man had been fighting madness.
“You mean when we were chasing Walter,” Jake said. “After the way station but before I . . . I took my fall.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember a little, but that’s all. The way you remember the stuff you dream about.”
Roland nodded. “Listen, then. I would tell you more this time, Jake, because you are older. I suppose we all are.”
Susannah was no less fascinated with the story the second time: how the boy Roland had chanced to discover Marten, his father’s advisor (his father’s wizard) in his mother’s apartment. Only none of it had been by chance, of course; the boy would have passed her door with no more than a glance had Marten not opened it and invited him in. Marten had told Roland that his mother wanted to see him, but one look at her rueful smile and downcast eyes as she sat in her low-back chair told the boy he was the last person in the world Gabrielle Deschain wanted to see just then.
The flush on her cheek and the love-bite on the side of her neck told him everything else.
Thus had he been goaded by Marten into an early trial of manhood, and by employing a weapon his teacher had not expected—his hawk, David—Roland had defeated Cort, taken his stick . . . and made the enemy of his life in Marten Broadcloak.
Beaten badly, face swelling into something that looked like a child’s goblin mask, slipping toward a coma, Cort had fought back unconsciousness long enough to offer his newest apprentice gunslinger counsel: stay away from Marten yet awhile, Cort had said.
“He told me to let the story of our battle grow into a legend,” the gunslinger told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. “To wait until my shadow had grown hair on its face and haunted Marten in his dreams.”
“Did you take his advice?” Susannah asked.
“I never got a chance,” Roland said. His face cracked in a rueful, painful smile. “I meant to think about it, and seriously, but before I even got started on my thinking, things . . . changed.”
“They have a way of doing that, don’t they?” Eddie said. “My goodness, yes.”
“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. Then—and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”
He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.
“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—”
“I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar,” Susannah said.
“I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in . . . well . . . let’s just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a place.”
Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland’s cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and below his lower lip. And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened summer air; what had happened in a whore’s crib above a drinking-dive in the lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World.
One boy, still aching from his battle of the day before and newly educated in the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shuttering those extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore’s breast, his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counterpane. One boy in the final instants of his life’s last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.
One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.
A knot exploded in the fire. Somewhere in this dream of Kansas, an animal yipped. Susannah watched sparks swirl up past Roland’s incredibly ancient face and saw in that face the sleeping boy of a summer’s morn, lying in a bawd’s bed. And then she saw the door crash open, ending Gilead’s last troubled dream.
15
The man who strode in, crossing the room to the bed before Roland could open his eyes (and before the woman beside him had even begun to register the sound), was tall, slim, dressed in faded jeans and a dusty shirt of blue chambray. On his head was a dark gray hat with a snakeskin band. Lying low on his hips were two old leather holsters. Jutting from them were the sandalwood grips of the pistols the boy would someday bear to lands of which this scowling man with the furious blue eyes would never dream.
Roland was in motion even before he was able to unseal his eyes, rolling to the left, groping beneath the bed for what was there. He was fast, so fast it was scary, but—and Susannah saw this, too, saw it clearly—the man in the faded jeans was faster yet. He grabbed the boy’s shoulder and yanked, turning him naked out of bed and onto the floor. The boy sprawled there, reaching again for what was beneath the bed, lightning-quick. The man in the jeans stamped down on his fingers before they could grasp.
“Bastard!” the boy gasped. “Oh, you bas—”
But now his eyes were open, he looked up, and saw that the invading bastard was his father.
The whore was sitting up now, her eyes puffy, her face slack and petulant. “Here!” she cried. “Here, here! You can’t just be a-comin in like that, so you can’t! Why, if I was to raise my voice—”
Ignoring her, the man reached beneath the bed and dragged out two gunbelts. Near the end of each was a holstered revolver. They were large, and amazing in this largely gunless world, but they were not so large as those worn by Roland’s father, and the grips were eroded metal plates rather than inlaid wood. When the whore saw the guns on the invader’s hips and the ones in his hands—the ones her young customer of the night before had been wearing until she had taken him upstairs and divested him of all weapons save for the one with which she was most famil
iar—the expression of sleepy petulance left her face. What replaced it was the foxlike look of a born survivor. She was up, out of bed, across the floor, and out the door before her bare bum had more than a brief moment to twinkle in the morning sun.
Neither the father standing by the bed nor the son lying naked upon the floor at his feet so much as looked at her. The man in the jeans held out the gunbelts which Roland had taken from the fuzer beneath the apprentices’ barracks on the previous afternoon, using Cort’s key to open the arsenal door. The man shook the belts under Roland’s very nose, as one might hold a torn garment beneath the nose of a feckless puppy that has chewed. He shook them so hard that one of the guns tumbled free. Despite his stupefaction, Roland caught it in midair.
“I thought you were in the west,” Roland said. “In Cressia. After Farson and his—”
Roland’s father slapped him hard enough to send the boy tumbling across the room and into a corner with blood pouring from one corner of his mouth. Roland’s first, appalling instinct was to raise the gun he still held.
Steven Deschain looked at him, hands on hips, reading this thought even before it was fully formed. His lips pulled back in a singularly mirthless grin, one that showed all of his teeth and most of his gums.
“Shoot me if you will. Why not? Make this abortion complete. Ah, gods, I’d welcome it!”
Roland laid the gun on the floor and pushed it away, using the back of his hand to do it. All at once he wanted his fingers nowhere near the trigger of a gun. They were no longer fully under his control, those fingers. He had discovered that yesterday, right around the time he had broken Cort’s nose.
“Father, I was tested yesterday. I took Cort’s stick. I won. I’m a man.”
“You’re a fool,” his father said. His grin was gone now; he looked haggard and old. He sat down heavily on the whore’s bed, looked at the gunbelts he still held, and dropped them between his feet. “You’re a fourteen-year-old fool, and that’s the worst, most desperate kind.” He looked up, angry all over again, but Roland didn’t mind; anger was better than that look of weariness. That look of age. “I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius, but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods! You have forgotten the face of your father! Say it!”
