The Dark Tower (Page 80)

"That’ll help."

Jake tucked Oy into his shirt. "Roland, were you able to show Sheemie-"

"Look," Roland said, taking his hands. The others now made a tight circle around them. "Look. I think you’ll see."

A brilliant seam opened in the darkness, obliterating Sheemie and Ted from Jake’s view. For a moment it trembled and darkened, and Jake thought it would disappear. Then it grew bright again and spread wider. He heard, very faindy

(the way you heard things when you were underwater), the sound of a car or truck passing in that other world. And saw a building with a small asphalt lot in front of it. Three cars and a pickup truck were parked there.

Daylight! he thought, dismayed. Because if time never ran backward in the Keystone World, that meant that time had slipped. If that was Keystone World, then it was Saturday, the nineteenth of June, in the year-

"Quick!" Ted shouted from the other side of that brilliant hole in reality. "If you’re going, go now! He’s going to faint! If you’re going-"

Roland yanked Jake forward, his purse bouncing on his back as he did so.

Wait! Jake wanted to shout. Wait, I forgot my stuff!

But it was too late. There was the sensation of big hands squeezing his chest, and he felt all the air whoosh out of his lungs. He thought, Pressure change. There was a sensation of falling up and then he was reeling onto the pavement of the parking lot with his shadow tacked to his heels, squinting and grimacing, wondering in some distant part of his mind how long it had been since his eyes had been exposed to plain old natural daylight. Not since entering the Doorway Cave in pursuit of Susannah, maybe.

Very faintly he heard someone-he thought it was the girl who had kissed him-call Good luck, and then it was gone.

Thunderclap was gone, and the Devar-Toi, and the darkness.

They were America-side, in the parking lot of the place to which Roland’s memory and Sheemie’s power-boosted by the other four Breakers-had taken them. It was die East Stoneham General Store, where Roland and Eddie had been ambushed by Jack Andolini. Only unless there had been some horrible error that had been twenty-two years earlier. This was June 19th of 1999, and the clock in the window (IT’s ALWAYS TIME FOR BOAR’s HEAD MEATS! was written in a circle around the face) said it was nineteen minutes of four in the afternoon.

Time was almost up.

Part Three:IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD

Chapter I:MRS. TASSENBAUM DRIVES SOUTH

ONE

The fact of his own almost unearthly speed of hand never occurred to Jake Chambers. All he knew was that when he staggered out of the Devar-Toi and back into America, his shirt-belled out into a pregnant curve by Oy’s weight-was pulling out of his jeans. The bumbler, who never had much luck when it came to passing between the worlds (he’d nearly been squashed by a taxicab the last time), tumbled free. Almost anyone else in the world would have been unable to prevent that fall (and in fact it very likely wouldn’t have hurt Oy at all), but Jake wasn’t almost anyone. Ka had wanted him so badly that it had even found its way around death to put him at Roland’s side. Now his hands shot out with a speed so great that they momentarily blurred away to nothing. When they reappeared, one was curled into the thick shag at the nape of Oy’s neck and the other into the shorter fur at the rump end of his long back. Jake set his friend down on the pavement. Oy looked up at him and gave a single short bark. It seemed to express not one idea but two: thanks, and don’t do that again.

"Come on," Roland said. "We have to hurry."

Jake followed him toward the store, Oy falling in at his accustomed place by the boy’s left heel. There was a sign hanging in the door from a little rubber suction cup. It read WE’RE OPEN, so COME IN ‘N VISIT, just as it had in 1977. Taped in the window to the left of the door was this:

COME ONE COME ALL

TO THE 1ST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

BEANHOLE BEAN SUPPER

Saturday June 19th, 1999

Intersection Route 7 amp; Klatt Road PARISH HOUSE (In Back)

5 PM-7:30 PM

AT 1st CONGO

"WE’RE ALWAYS GLAD TO SEEYA, NAYiAH!"

Jake thought, The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They ‘II already be putting down the tablecloths and setting the places.

Taped to the right of the door was a more startling message to the public: ist Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins Will YOU join us for Worship?

Sunday services: io AM

Thursday services: y PM

EVERY WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7-9 PM!

Games! Music! Scripture!

NEWS OF WALK-INS!

Hey, Teens!

"Be There or Be Square!!!".

We Seek the Doorway to Heaven-Will You Seek With Us?"

Take found himself thinking of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might have been attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but his heart-

"Hurry, Jake," Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the door. Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of Took’s on the Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things nice.

He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least two things with him, after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, and the bag of Orizas was still slung over his shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a dozen plates remaining inside would be within easy reach of his right hand.

TWO

Wendell "Chip" McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the door rang, once more turning Chip’s life upside down (You ‘ve turned turtle, the oldtimers used to say when your car rolled in the ditch), they had been discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on Keywadin Pond…

or rather Mrs. Tassenbaum had been discussing it.

Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot.

She could afford a cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda… he supposed…

if you didn’t mind the makeup and the hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt perfectlyjustified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale… a trick he had learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try doing that in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine feet high. This wasn’t February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum-a Daughter of Abraham if he had ever seen one-was not from these parts.

No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfecdy comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he hadn’t entirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pu**y than a toilet seat.

"And now Gore expects to just… ride in on his coattails!"

Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). "Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who really did invent the Internet!" She looked up (Chip’s thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and gave Chip a roguish litde smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two register. "I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!"

Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white paper. He was glad to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from Viking Motors ("The Boys with the Toys") in Oxford himself.

"I know what you mean! That fella Gore, too slick!" Mrs.

Tassenbaum was nodding endiusiastically, and so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. "His hair, for instance-how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his-"

That was when the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A goddamned lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell "Chip" McAvoy knew the man who’d caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through the door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn’t he always known, deep in his heart’s most secret place, that the man with die terrible blue eyes hadn’t finished his business and would be back?