The Dark Tower (Page 23)

John Cullum considered this, then nodded. He turned to Eddie.

Eddie took a deep breath. "The first thing you ought to know is that I met this guy here in a middle of an airplane flight from Nassau, the Bahamas, to Kennedy Airport in New York. I

was hooked on heroin at the time, and so was my brouier. I was muling a load of cocaine."

"And when might this have been, son?" John Cullum asked.

"The summer of 1987."

They saw wonder on Cullum’s face but no shade of disbelief.

"So you do come from the future! Gorry!" He leaned forward through the fragrant pipe-smoke. "Son," he said, "tell your tale. And don’tcha skip a goddam word."

FOUR

It took Eddie almost an hour and a half-and in the cause of brevity he did skip some of the things that had happened to them. By the time he’d finished, a premature night had settled on the lake below them. And still the threatening storm neither broke nor moved on. Above Dick Beckhardt’s cottage thunder sometimes rumbled and sometimes cracked so sharply they all jumped. A stroke of lightning jabbed directly into the center of the narrow lake below them, briefly illuminating the entire surface a delicate nacreous purple. Once the wind arose, making voices move through the trees, and Eddie thought It’ll come now, surely it will come now, but it did not. Nor did the impending storm leave, and this queer suspension, like a sword hanging by the thinnest of threads, made him think of Susannah’s long, strange pregnancy, now terminated. At around seven o’clock the power went out and John looked through the kitchen cabinets for a supply of candles while Eddie talked on-the old people of River Crossing, the mad people in the city of Lud, the terrified people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they’d met a former priest who seemed to have stepped directly out of a book. John put the candles on the table, along with crackers and cheese and a bottle of Red Zinger iced tea. Eddie finished with their visit to Stephen King, telling how the gunslinger had hypnotized the writer to forget their visit, how they had briefly seen their friend Susannah, and how they had called John Cullum because, as Roland said, there was no one else in this part of the world they could call. When Eddie fell silent, Roland told of meeting Chevin of Chayven on their way to Turtleback Lane.

The gunslinger laid the silver cross he’d shown Chevin on the table by the plate of cheese, and John poked the fine links of the chain with one thick thumbnail.

Then, for a long time, there was silence.

When he could bear it no longer, Eddie asked the old caretaker how much of the tale he believed.

"All of it," John said without hesitation. "You gut to take care of that rose in New York, don’t you?"

"Yes," Roland said.

"Because that’s what’s kep’ one of those Beams safe while most of the others has been broken down by these what-do-youcall-em telepathies, the Breakers."

Eddie was amazed at how quickly and easily Cullum had grasped that, but perhaps there was no reason to be. Fresh eyes see clear, Susannah liked to say. And Cullum was very much what the grays of Lud would have called "a trig cove."

"Yes," Roland said. ‘You say true."

"The rose is takin care of one Beam. Stephen King’s in charge of the other ‘un. Least, that’s what you think."

Eddie said, "He’d bear watching, John-all else aside, he’s got some lousy habits-but once we leave this world’s 1977, we can never come back and check on him."

"King doesn’t exist in any of these other worlds?" John asked.

"Almost surely not," Roland said.

"Even if he does," Eddie put in, "what he does in them doesn’t matter. This is the key world. This, and the one Roland came from. This world and that one are twins."

He looked at Roland for confirmation. Roland nodded and lit the last of the cigarettes John had given him earlier.

"I might be able to keep an eye on Stephen King," John said.

"He don’t need to know I’m doin it, either. That is, if I get back from doin your cussed business in New York. I gut me a pretty good idear what it is, but maybe you’d better spell it out."

From his back pocket he took a battered notepad with the words Mead Memo written on the green cover. He paged most of the way through it, found a blank sheet, produced a pencil from his breast pocket, licked the tip (Eddie restrained a shudder), and then looked at them as expectandy as any freshman on the first day of high school.

"Now, dearies," he said, "why don’t you tell your Uncle John the rest."

FIVE

This time Roland did most of the talking, and although he had less to say than Eddie, it still took him half an hour, for he spoke with great caution, every now and then turning to Eddie for help with a word or phrase. Eddie had already seen the killer and the diplomat who lived inside Roland of Gilead, but this was his first clear look at the envoy, a messenger who meant to get every word right. Outside, the storm still refused to break or to go away.

At last the gunslinger sat back. In the yellow glow of the candles, his face appeared both ancient and strangely lovely. Looking at him, Eddie for the first time suspected there might be more wrong with him than what Rosalita Munoz had called "the dry twist." Roland had lost weight, and the dark circles beneath his eyes whispered of illness. He drank off a whole glass of the red tea at a single draught, and asked: "Do you understand the things I’ve told you?"

"Ayuh." No more than that.

"Ken it very well, do ya?" Roland pressed. "No questions?"

"Don’t think so."

"Tell it back to us, then."

John had filled two pages with notes in his looping scrawl.

Now he paged back and forth between them, nodding to himself a couple of times. Then he grunted and returned the pad to his hip pocket. He may be a country cousin, but he’s a long way from stupid, Eddie thought. And meeting him was a long way from just luck; that was ka having a very good day.

"Go to New York," John said. "Find this fella Aaron Deepneau.

Keep his buddy out of it. Convince Deepneau that takin care of the rose in that vacant lot is just about the most important job in the world."

"You can cut the just-about," Eddie said.

John nodded as if that went without saying. He picked up the piece of notepaper with the cartoon beaver on top and tucked it into his voluminous wallet. Passing the bill of sale to him had been one of the harder things Eddie Dean had had to do since being sucked through the unfound door and into East Stoneham, and he came close to snatching it back before it could disappear into the caretaker’s battered old Lord Buxton.

He thought he understood much better now about how Calvin Tower had felt.

"Because you boys now own the lot, you own the rose," John said.

"The Tet Corporation now owns the rose," Eddie said. "A corporation of which you’re about to become executive vicepresident."

John Cullum looked unimpressed with his putative new title. He said, "Deepneau’s supposed to draw up articles of incorporation and make sure Tet’s legal. Then we go to see this fella Moses Carver and make sure he gets on board. That’s apt to be the hard part-" Haa-aad paa-aat "-but we’ll give it our best go."

"Put Auntie’s cross around your neck," Roland said, "and when you meet with sai Carver, show it to him. It may go a long way toward convincing him you’re on the straight. But first you must blow on it, like this."

On their ride from Bridgton, Roland had asked Eddie if he could think of any secret-no matter how trivial or great-which Susannah and her godfather might have shared in common.

As a matter of fact Eddie did know such a secret, and he was now astounded to hear Susannah speak it from the cross which lay on Dick Beckhardt’s pine table.

"We buried Pimsy under the apple tree, where he could watch the blossoms fall in the spring," her voice said. "And Daddy Mose told me not to cry anymore, because God thinks to mourn a pet too long…"

Here the words faded away, first to a mutter and then to nothing at all. But Eddie remembered the rest and repeated it now: "’… to mourn a pet too long’s a sin.’ She said Daddy Mose told her she could go to Pimsy’s grave once in awhile and whisper ‘Be happy in heaven’ but never to tell anyone else, because preachers don’t hold much with the idea of animals going to heaven. And she kept the secret. I was the only one she ever told." Eddie, perhaps remembering that post-coital confidence in the dark of night, was smiling painfully.

John Cullum looked at the cross, then up at Roland, wideeyed.

"What is it? Some kind of tape recorder? It ain’t, is it?"

"It’s a sigul," Roland said patiently. "One that may help you with this fellow Carver, if he turns out to be what Eddie calls "a hardass.’" The gunslinger smiled a litde. Hardass was a term he liked. One he understood. "Put it on."

But Cullum didn’t, at least not at once. For the first time since the old fellow had come into their acquaintance-including that period when they’d been under fire in the General Store-he looked genuinely discomposed. "Is it magic?" he asked.

Roland shrugged impatiently, as if to tell John that the word had no useful meaning in this context, and merely repeated: "Put it on."

Gingerly, as if he thought Aunt Talitha’s cross might glow redhot at any moment and give him a serious burn, John Cullum did as bid. He bent his head to look down at it (momentarily giving his long Yankee face an amusing burgher’s double chin), then tucked it into his shirt.