The Dark Tower (Page 77)

"Ted says to tell you it’s almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya. Also that time could slip a notch."

Roland nodded. ‘Yet we’ll wait for this to be finished, I think. It won’t be much longer, and we owe him that."

"How much longer?" Jake murmured.

"I don’t know. I thought he might be gone before you got here, even if you ran-"

"I did, once I got to the grassy part-"

"-but, as you see…"

"He fights hard," Susannah said, and that this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. "My man fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say."

TEN

And so he did. Five endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie’s eyes opened. "Sue…" He said,

"Su… sie-"

She leaned close, still holding his hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration fiercely narrowed. And with an effort Jake wouldn’t have believed possible, Eddie freed one of his hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed no sign. The smile that bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps even sensuous.

"Eddie! Welcome back!"

"Don’t bullshit… a bullshitter," he whispered. "I’m goin, sweetheart, not comin."

"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 botde 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 die Dark Tower? Stephen King’s version of the Dark Tower? Or Gan’s version, or the Prims 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.