The Dark Tower (Page 92)

The single loud shot that would mean he had ended his sorrow in the most direct fashion.

When she couldn’t stand the quiet from the other side of the wall any longer she got up, put her clothes back on, and went outside to look at the stars. There, sitting on the curb, she found Roland, with the not-dog at his side. She wanted to ask how he had gotten out of his room without her being aware of it (the walls were so thin and she had been listening so hard), but she didn’t. She asked him what he was doing out here, instead, and found herself unprepared for both his answer and for the utter nakedness of the face he turned to hers. She kept expecting a patina of civilization from him-a nod in the direction of the niceties-but there was none of that. His honesty was terrifying.

"I’m afraid to go to sleep," he said. "I’m afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me."

She looked at him steadily in the mixture of light: that which fell from her room and the horrible heardess Halloween glare of the parking-lot arc sodiums. Her heart was beating hard enough to shake her entire chest, but when she spoke her voice sounded calm enough: "Would it help if I lay down with you?"

He considered this, and nodded. "I think it would."

She took his hand and they went into the room she had rented him. He stripped off his clothes with no sign of embarrassment and she looked, awestruck and afraid, at the scars which lapped and dented his upper body: the red pucker of a knife-slash on one bicep, the milky weal of a burn on another, the white crisscross of lash-marks between and on the shoulderblades, three deep dimples that could only be old bulletholes.

And, of course, there were the missing fingers on his right hand. She was curious but knew she’d never dare ask about those.

She took off her own outer clothes, hesitated, then took off her bra, as well. Her br**sts hung down, and there was a dented scar of her own on one, from a lumpectomy instead of a bullet.

And so what? She never would have been a Victoria’s Secret model, even in her prime. And even in her prime she’d never mistaken herself for tits and ass attached to a life-support system.

Nor had ever let anyone else-including her husband-make the same mistake.

She left her panties on, however. If she had trimmed her bush, maybe she would have taken them off. If she’d known, getting up that morning, that she would be lying down with a strange man in a cheap hotel room while some weird animal snoozed on the bathmat in front of the tub. Of course she would have packed a toothbrush and a tube of Crest, too.

When he put her arms around her, she gasped and stiffened, then relaxed. But very slowly. His hips pressed against her bottom and she felt the considerable weight of his package, but it was apparently only comfort he had in mind; his penis was limp.

He clasped her left breast, and ran his thumb into the hollow of the scar left by the lumpectomy. "What’s this?" he asked.

"Well," she said (now her voice was no longer even), "according to my doctor, in another five years it would have been cancer.

So they cut it out before it could… I don’t know, exactly-metastasizing comes later, if it comes at all."

"Before it could flower?" he asked.

"Yes. Right. Good." Her nipple was now as hard as a rock, and surely he must feel that. Oh, this was so weird.

"Why is your heart beating so hard?" he asked. "Do I frighten you?"

"I… yes."

"Don’t be frightened," he said. "Killing’s done." A long pause in the dark. They could hear the faint drone of cars on the turnpike. "For now," he added.

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "Good."

His hand on her breast. His breath on her neck. After some endless time that might have been an hour or only five minutes, his breathing lengthened, and she knew he had gone to sleep. She was pleased and disappointed at the same time. A few minutes later she went to sleep herself, and it was the best rest she’d had in years. If he had bad dreams of his gone friends, he did not disturb her with them. When she woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and he was standing naked at the window, looking out through a slit he’d made in the curtains with one finger.

"Did you sleep?" she asked.

"A little. Will we go on?"

FIFTEEN

They could have been in Manhattan by three o’clock in the afternoon, and the drive into the city on a Sunday would have been far easier than during the Monday morning rush hour, but hotel rooms in New York were expensive and even doubling up would have necessitated breaking out a credit card. They stayed at a Motel 6 in Harwich, Connecticut, instead. She took only a single room and that night he made love to her. Not because he exactly wanted to, she sensed, but because he understood it was what she wanted. Perhaps what she needed.

It was extraordinary, although she could not have said precisely how; despite the feel of all those scars beneath her hands-some rough, some smooth-there was the sense of making love to a dream. And that night she did dream. It was a field filled with roses she dreamed of, and a huge Tower made of slate-black stone standing at the far end. Partway up, red lamps glowed… only she had an idea they weren’t lamps at all, but eyes.

Terrible eyes.

She heard many singing voices, thousands of them, and understood that some were the voices of his lost friends. She awoke with tears on her cheeks and a feeling of loss even though he was still beside her. After today she’d see him no more. And that was for the best. Still, she would have given anything in her life to have him make love to her again, even though she understood it had not been really her he had been making love to; even when he came into her, his thoughts had been far away, with those voices.

Those lost voices.

Chapter III:NEW YORK AGAIN (ROLAND SHOWS ID)

ONE

On the morning of Monday the 21st of June in the year of ’99, the sun shone down on New York City just as if Jake Chambers did not lie dead in one world and Eddie Dean in another; as if Stephen King did not lie in a Lewiston hospital’s Intensive Care ward, drifting out into the light of consciousness only for brief intervals; as if Susannah Dean did not sit alone with her grief aboard a train racing on ancient, chancy tracks across the dark wastes of Thunderclap toward the ghost-town of Fedic.

There were others who had elected to accompany her on her journey at least that far, but she’d asked them to give her space, and they had complied with her wish. She knew she would feel better if she could cry, but so far she hadn’t been able to do that-a few random tears, like meaningless showers in the desert, was the best she had been able to manage-although she had a terrible feeling that things were worse than she knew.

Fuck, dat ain’t no "feelin," Detta crowed contemptuously from her place deep inside, as Susannah sat looking out at the dark and rocky wastelands or the occasional ruins of towns and villages that had been abandoned when the world moved on. You havin a jenna-wine intuition, girl! Only question you cain’t answer is whether it be ole long tall and ugly or Young Master Sxveetness now visitin wit’yo man in the clearin.

"Please, no," she murmured. "Please not either of them,

God, I can’t stand another one."

But God remained deaf to her prayer, Jake remained dead, the Dark Tower remained standing at the end of Can’-Ka No Rey, casting its shadow over a million shouting roses, and in New York the hot summer sun shone down on the just and the unjust alike.

Can you give me hallelujah?

Thankee-sai.

Now somebody yell me a big old God-bomb amen.

TWO

Mrs. Tassenbaum left her car at Sir Speedy-Park on Sixty-third Street (the sign on the sidewalk showed a knight in armor behind the wheel of a Cadillac, his lance sticking jauntily out of the driver’s window), where she and David rented two stalls on a yearly basis. They kept an apartment nearby, and Irene asked Roland if he would like to go there and clean up… although the man actually didn’t look all that bad, she had to admit.

She’d bought him a fresh pair of jeans and a white button-up shirt which he had rolled to the elbows; she had also bought a comb and a tube of hair-mousse so strong its molecular makeup was probably closer to Super-Glue than it was to Vitalis. With the unruly mop of gray-flecked hair combed straight back from his brow, she had revealed the spare good looks and angular features of an interesting crossbreed: a mixture of Quaker and Cherokee was what she imagined. The bag of Orizas was once more slung over his shoulder. His gun, the holster wrapped in its shell-belt, was in there, too. He had covered it from enquiring eyes with the Old Home Days tee-shirt.

Roland shook his head. "I appreciate the offer, but I’d as soon do what needs doing and then go back to where I belong." He surveyed the hurrying throngs on the sidewalks bleakly. "If I belong anywhere."

"You could stay at the apartment for a couple of days and rest up," she said. "I’d stay with you." And f**k thy brains out, do it please ya, she thought, and could not help a smile. "I mean, I know you won’t, but you need to know the offer’s open."

He nodded. "Thankee, but there’s a woman who needs me to get back to her as soon as I can." It felt like a lie to him, and a grotesque one at that. Based on everything that had happened, part of him thought that Susannah Dean needed Roland of Gilead back in her life almost as much as nursery bah-bos needed rat poison added to their bedtime bottles.

Irene Tassenbaum accepted it, however. And part of her was actually anxious to get back to her husband. She had called him last night (using a pay phone a mile from the motel, just to be safe), and it seemed that she had finally gotten David Seymour Tassenbaum’s attention again. Based on her encounter with Roland, David’s attention was definitely second prize, but it was better than nothing, by God. Roland Deschain would vanish from her life soon, leaving her to find her way back to northern New England on her own and explain what had happened as best she could. Part of her mourned the impending loss, but she’d had enough adventure in the last forty hovxrs or so to last her for the rest of her life, hadn’t she? And things to think about, that too. For one thing, it seemed that the world was thinner than she had ever imagined. And reality wider.