The Dark Tower (Page 6)

Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!

How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but there, the sound of besual, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.

Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger’s left hand, thinking-

He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it-

"-and may you climb to the top," Eddie breathed.

They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked-askew but otherwise peacefully enough-at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them-

Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it and forced it down.

"Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone." A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was right, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s eyes were shiny with tears. "He’s gone, too. The Pere."

"The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did… Did they…?" Eddie couldn’t finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one of them was too awful to speak aloud.

"No, Eddie. Not at all. He-" Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking at Eddie as he did it.

"He escaped them," Eddie said.

"Aye, and how angry they must be."

Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No, sobbing. "Good," he said. "Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself witfi it." And as Roland did: "What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?"

"I think it was a bit of both," Roland said. "There’s a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it."

"And allowed to see what we wanted to see."

Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. "We saw what the Beam wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go."

"Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in… I don’t know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends O’The Rainbow?"

Roland was smiling. ‘Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales."

Roland didn’t answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get his breath back-both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the potential of sai King… of what sai King might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn’t King also being carried on aven kal, perhaps generating the very wave that lifted him?

A man can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort had been wrong.

Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man could pull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator?

And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something r o r a nothing-seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?

And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long Philosophical thoughts while two members of his tet were lost?

Get this carriage going," Roland said, trying to ignore the sweet humming he could hear-whether the Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know. "We’ve got to get to Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way through to where Susannah is."

And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.

Eddie reached for the transmission lever-despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie had never quit running-and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at Roland with a bleak eye.

"What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is, spill it quick. The baby’s coming now-may have come already. Soon they’ll have no more use for her!"

"I know," Eddie said. "But we can’t go to Lovell." He grimaced as if what he was saying was causing him physical pain.

Roland guessed it probably was. "Not yet."

TWO

They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweedy tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices.

They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a million faces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you say lost.

Eddie half-expected Roland to shout at him-it wouldn’t be the first time-or maybe clout him upside the head, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when his pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to the jaw might clear his head, by Shardik.

Only muddy thinking’s not the trouble and you know it, he thought. Your head is clearer than his. If it wasn % you could let go of this luorld and go on hunting for your lost wife.

At last Roland spoke. "What is it, then? This?" He bent and picked up the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau’s pinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked it into Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.

"You know how much I love her," Eddie said in a low, trained voice. "You know that."

Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.

"I’d go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, this second! But we have to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave today,

July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We-"

"Eddie, we’ve been through all of this." Still not looking at him.

"Yes, but do you understand it? Only one bullet to shoot, one

"Riza to throw. That’s why we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. And I was right, wasn’t I?" Almost pleading now. "Wasn’t I?"

Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was glad. This was hard enough, wretched enough, without having to bear the turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.

"And it may not matter if we stay a little longer. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those two beds,

Roland-if we concentrate on Suze and Mia as we last saw them-then it’s possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn’t it?"

After a long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn t conscious of drawing a single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they ound what the gunslinger had come to think of as an "old-ones or" because such doors were dedicated, and always came out e same place. But were they to find a magic door somewhere aong Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behind en the Prim receded, then yes, they might be able to cut in where they wanted. But such doors could be tricky, too; this they had found out for themselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door there had sent Jake and Callahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie, thereby scattering all their plans into the Land of Nineteen.

"What else must we do?" Roland said. There was no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded both tired and unsure.

"Whatever it is, it’s gonna be hard. That much I guarantee you."

Eddie took the bill of sale and gazed at it as grimly as any Hamlet in the history of drama had ever stared upon the skull of poor Yorick. Then he looked back at Roland. "This gives us title to the vacant lot with the rose in it. We need to get it to Moses Carver of Holmes Dental Industries. And where is he? We don’t know."

"For that matter, Eddie, we don’t even know if he’s still alive."

Eddie voiced a wild laugh. "You say true, I say thankya!

Why don’t I turn us around, Roland? I’ll drive us back to Stephen King’s house. We can cadge twenty or thirty bucks off him-because, brother, I don’t know if you noticed, but we don’t have a crying dime between the two of us-but more important, we can get him to write us a really good hardboiled private eye, someone who looks like Bogart and kicks ass like Clint Eastwood. Let him track down this guy Carver for us!"