“No,” Jake said. “I keep thinking about Susannah.” He paused, then added: “And Benny.”
Eddie knew that was natural, the boy had seen his friend blown apart before his very eyes, of
course he’d be thinking about him, but Eddie still felt a bitter spurt of jealousy, as if all of Jake’s regard should have been saved for Eddie Dean’s wife.
“That Tavery kid,” Jake said. “It’s his fault. Panicked. Got running. Broke his ankle. If not for him, Benny’d still be alive.” And very softly — it would have chilled the heart of the boy in question had he heard it, Eddie had no doubt of that — Jake said: “Frank . . . fucking . . .
Tavery.”
Eddie reached out a hand that did not want to comfort and made it touch the kid’s head. His
hair was long. Needed awash. Hell, needed a cut. Needed a mother to make sure the boy under it
took care of it. No mother now, though, not for Jake. And a little miracle: giving comfort made Eddie feel better. Not a lot, but a little.
“Let it go,” He said. “Done is done.”
“Ka,” Jake said bitterly.
“Ki-yet, ka,” Oy said without raising his muzzle.
“Amen,” Jake said, and laughed. It was disturbing in its coldness. Jake took the Ruger from its makeshift holster and looked at it. “This one will go through, because it came from the other side. That’s what Roland says. The others may, too, because we won’t be going todash. If they
don’t, Henchick will cache them in the cave and maybe we can come back for them.”
“If we wind up in New York,” Eddie said, “there’ll be plenty of guns. And we’ll find them.”
“Not like Roland’s. I hope like hell they go through. There aren’t any guns left in any of the worlds like his. That’s what I think.”
It was what Eddie thought, too, but he didn’t bother saying so. From town there came a rattle
of firecrackers, then silence. It was winding down there. Winding down at last. Tomorrow there
would undoubtedly be an all-day party on the common, a continuation of today’s celebration but
a little less drunk and a little more coherent. Roland and his ka-tet would be expected as guests of honor, but if the gods of creation were good and the door opened, they would be gone.
Hunting Susannah. Finding her. Never mind hunting. Finding.
As if reading his thoughts (and he could do that, he was strong in the touch), Jake said: “She’s still alive.”
“How can you know that?”
“We would have felt it if she was gone.”
“Jake, can you touch her?”
“No, but — ”
Before he could finish, a deep rumbling came from the earth. The porch suddenly began to rise
and fall like a boat on a heavy sea. They could hear the boards groaning. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china like chattering teeth. Oy raised his head and whined. His foxy little face was comically startled, his ears laid back along his skull. In Callahan’s parlor, something fell over and shattered.
Eddie’s first thought, illogical but strong, was that Jake had killed Suze simply by declaring her still alive.
For a moment the shaking intensified. A window shattered as its frame was twisted out of
shape. There was a crump from the darkness. Eddie assumed — correctly — that it was the
ruined privy, now falling down completely. He was on his feet without realizing it. Jake was
standing beside him, gripping his wrist. Eddie had drawn Roland’s gun and now they both stood as if ready to begin shooting.
There was a final grumbling from deep in the earth, and then the porch settled under their feet.
At certain key points along the Beam, people were waking up and looking around, dazed. In the
streets of one New York when, a few car alarms were going off. The following day’s papers
would report a minor earthquake: broken windows, no reported casualties. Just a little shake of the fundamentally sound bedrock.
Jake was looking at Eddie, eyes wide. And knowing.
The door opened behind them and Callahan came out onto the porch, dressed in flimsy white
underpants that fell to his knees. The only other thing on him was the gold crucifix around his neck.
“It was an earthquake, wasn’t it?” he said. “I felt one in northern California once, but never since coming to the Calla.”
“It was a hell of a lot more than an earthquake,” Eddie said, and pointed. The screened-in porch looked east, and over there the horizon was lit by silent artillery bursts of green lightning.
Downhill from the rectory, the door of Rosalita’s snug creaked open and then banged shut. She
and Roland came up the hill together, she in her chemise and the gunslinger in a pair of jeans, both barefoot in the dew.
Eddie, Jake, and Callahan went down to them. Roland was looking fixedly at the already
diminishing flickers of lightning in the east, where the land of Thunderclap waited for them, and the Court of the Crimson King, and, at the end of End-World, the Dark Tower itself.
If, Eddie thought. If it still stands.
“Jake was just saying that if Susannah died, we’d know it,” Eddie said. “That there’d be what you call a sigul. Then comes this.” He pointed to the Peres lawn, where a new ridge had humped up, peeling the sod apart in one ten-foot line to show the puckered brown lips of the earth. A
chorus of dogs was barking in town, but there were no sounds from the folken, at least not yet; Eddie supposed a goodly number had slept through the whole thing. The sleep of the drunken
victorious. “But it wasn’t anything to do with Suze. Was it?”
“Not directly, no.”
“And it wasn’t ours,” Jake put in, “or the damage would have been a lot worse. Don’t you think?”
Roland nodded.
Rosa looked at Jake with a mixture of puzzlement and fright. “Wasn’t our what, boy? What are you talking about? It wasn’t an earthquake, sure!”
“No,” Roland said, “a Beam quake . One of the Beams holding up the Tower — which holds up everything — just let go. Just snapped.”
Even in the faint light from the four ‘seners flickering on the porch, Eddie saw Rosalita
Munoz’s face lose its color. She crossed herself. “A Beam? One of the Beams? Say no! Say not true!”
Eddie found himself thinking of some long-ago baseball scandal. Of some little boy begging,
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
“I can’t,” Roland told her, “because it is.”
“How many of these Beams are there?” Callahan asked.
Roland looked at Jake, and nodded slightly: Say your lesson, Jake of New York — speak and be true.
“Six Beams connecting twelve portals,” Jake said. “The twelve portals are at the twelve ends of the earth. Roland, Eddie, and Susannah really started their quest from the Portal of the Bear, and picked me up between there and Lud.”
“Shardik,” Eddie said. He was watching the last flickers of lightning in the east. “That was the bear’s name.”
“Yes, Shardik,” Jake agreed. “So we’re on the Beam of the Bear. All the Beams come together at the Dark Tower. Our Beam, on the other side of the Tower . . .?” He looked at Roland for help.
Roland, in turn, looked at Eddie Dean. Even now, it seemed, Roland was not done teaching them
the Way of Eld.
Eddie either didn’t see the look or chose to ignore it, but Roland would not be put off.
“Eddie?” he murmured.
“We’re on the Path of the Bear, Way of the Turtle,” Eddie said absently. “I don’t know why it would ever matter, since the Tower’s as far as we’re going, but on the other side it’s the Path of the Turtle, Way of the Bear.” And he recited:
” See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth,
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind. ”
At this point, Rosalita took up the verse
” On his back the truth is carried,
And there are love and duty married.
He loves the earth and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me. ”
“Not quite the way I learned it in my cradle and taught it to my friends,” Roland said, “but close enough, by watch and by warrant.”
“The Great Turtle’s name is Maturin,” Jake said, and shrugged. “If it matters.”
“You have no way of telling which one broke?” Callahan said, studying Roland closely.
Roland shook his head. “All I know is that Jake’s right — it wasn’t ours. If it had been, nothing within a hundred miles of Calla Bryn Sturgis would be standing.” Or maybe within a thousand miles — who could know? “The very birds would have fallen flaming from the sky.”