The Dark Tower (Page 22)

They passed a sign that said FENN, I 1, and another that said ISRAEL, 12. Then they came around a curve and Eddie stamped on the Galaxie’s brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the side of the road beside a sign reading BECKHARDT, 13, was a familiar Ford pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the truck’s rustspotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue chambray shirt buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, watded neck. He also wore a Boston Red Sox cap tilted just a little to one side as if to say / got the drop on you, partner. He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and good-humored face on the breathless pre-storm air.

All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up nerves, aware that he was smiling as you do when you come across an old friend in a strange place-the Pyramids of Egypt, the marketplace in old Tangiers, maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane in Lovell on a thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also smiling.

Old long, tall, and ugly-smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed.

They got out of the car and approached John Cullum.

Roland raised a fist to his forehead and bent his knee a little.

"Hile, John! I see you very well."

"Ayuh, see you, too," John Cullum said. "Clear as day." He skimmed a salute outward from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he dipped his chin in Eddie’s direction. "Young fella."

"Long days and pleasant nights," Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.

"That’s a pretty thing to say," John remarked. Then: "I beat you here. Kinda thought I might."

Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it.

"I don’t think this is quite the place…?" In his voice was the barest touch of a question.

"Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up," John agreed, puffing his pipe. "I passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it." For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in ajar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.

"Why?" he asked. "What’s up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a door?" The idea occurred to him… and then seized him. "It is a door, isn’t it? And it’s open!"

John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider.

"Might be a door," he said, stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day: doe-ahh. "Doesn’t exactly look like a door, but… ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in that light?" He appeared to calculate. "Ayuh. But I think you boys want to palaver, and if we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won’t be no palaver; just you standin there with your jaws dropped." Cullum threw back his head and laughed. "Me, too!"

"What’s Cara Laughs?" Eddie asked.

John shrugged. "A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right now.

Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale. They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she…" He made a bottle-tipping motion.

Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Towerchasing business he didn’t understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtle-back Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.

He looked up and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West toward the White Mountains, too-what was almost surely called the Discordia in a world not far from here-and along the Path of the Beam.

Always along the Path of the Beam.

"What do you suggest, John?" Roland asked.

Cullum nodded at the sign reading BECKHARDT. "I’ve caretook for Dick Beckhardt since the late fifties," he said. "Helluva nice man. He’s in Wasin’ton now, doin something with the Carter administration." Caaa-tah. "I got a key. I think maybe we ought to go on down there. It’s warm n dry, and I don’t think it’s gonna be either one out here before long. You boys c’n tell your tale, and I c’n listen-which is a thing I do tol’ably well-and then we can all take a run up to Cara. I… well I just never…"

He shook his head, took his pipe out of his mouth, and looked at them with naked wonder. "I never seen the beat of it, I tell you. It was like I didn’t even know how to look at it."

"Come on," Roland said. "We’ll all ride down in your cartomobile, if it does ya."

"Does me just fine," John said, and got into the back.

THREE

Dick Beckhardt’s cottage was half a mile down, pine-walled, cozy.

There was a pot-bellied stove in the living room and a braided rug on the floor. The west-facing wall was glass from end to end and Eddie had to stand there for a moment, looking out, in spite of the urgency of their errand. The lake had gone a shade of dead ebony that was somehow frightening-like the eye of a zombie, he thought, and had no idea why he thought it. He had an idea that if the wind picked up (as it would surely do when the rain came), the whitecaps would ruffle the surface and make it easier to look at. Would take away that look of something looking back at you.

John Cullum sat at Dick Beckhardt’s table of polished pine, took off his hat, and held it in the bunched fingers of his right hand. He looked at Roland and Eddie gravely. "We know each other pretty damn well for folks who haven’t known each other very damn long," he said. "Wouldn’t you say that’s so?"

They nodded. Eddie kept expecting the wind to begin outside, but the world went on holding its breath. He was willing to bet it was going to be one hellacious storm when it came.

"Folks gut t’know each other that way in the Army," John said. "In the war." Aaa-my. And war too Yankee for representation.

"Way it always is when the chips’re down, I sh’d judge."

"Aye," Roland agreed. "’Gunfire makes close relations,’ we say."

"Do ya? Now I know you gut things to tell me, but before you start, there’s one thing I gut to tell you. And I sh’d smile n kiss a pig if it don’t please you good n hard."

"What?" Eddie asked.

"County Sheriff Eldon Royster took four fellas into custody over in Auburn couple of hours ago. Seems as though they was tryin to sneak past a police roadblock on a woods road and gut stuck for their trouble." John put his pipe in his mouth, took a wooden match from his breast pocket, and set his thumb against the tip. For the moment, however, he didn’t flick it; only held it there. "Reason they ‘us tryin to sneak around is they seemed to have quite a fair amount of fire-power." Fiah-powah.

"Machine-guns, grenades, and some of that stuff they call C-4.

One of em was a fella I b’lieve you mentioned-Jack Andolini?"

And with that he popped the Diamond Bluetip alight.

Eddie collapsed back in one of sai Beckhardt’s prim Shaker chairs, turned his head up to the ceiling, and bellowed laughter at the rafters. When he was tickled, Roland reflected, no one could laugh like Eddie Dean. At least not since Cuthbert Allgood had passed into the clearing. "Handsome Jack Andolini, sitting in a county hoosegow in the State of Maine!" he said.

"Roll me in sugar and call me a f**kin jelly-doughnut! If only my brother Henry was alive to see it."

Then Eddie realized that Henry probably was alive right now-some version of him, anyway. Assuming the Dean brothers existed in this world.

"Ayuh, thought that’d please ya," John said, drawing the flame of the rapidly blackening match down into the bowl of his pipe. It clearly pleased him, too. He was grinning almost too hard to kindle his tobacco.

"Oh deary-dear," Eddie said, wiping his eyes. "That makes my day. Almost makes my year."

"I gut somethin else for ya," John said, "but we’ll let her be for now." The pipe was at last going to his satisfaction and he settled back, eyes shifting between the two strange, wandering men he had met earlier that day. Men whose ka was now entwined with his own, for better or worse, and richer or poorer. "Right now I’d like t’hear your story. And just what it is you’d have me do."

"How old are you, John?" Roland asked him.

"Not s’ old I don’t still have a little get up n go," John replied, a trifle coldly. "What about y’self, chummy? How many times you ducked under the pole?"

Roland gave him a smile-the kind that said point taken, now let’s change the subject. "Eddie will speak for both of us," he said. They had decided on this during their ride from Bridgton.

"My own tale’s too long."

"Do you say so," John remarked.

"I do," Roland said. "Let Eddie tell you his story, as much as he has time for, and we’ll both tell what we’d have you do, and then, if you agree, he’ll give you one thing to take to a man named Moses Carver… and I’ll give you another."