Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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

sohard ), 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 heartless 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 bullet-holes. 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 breasts

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 shedid 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.

Terribleeyes.

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 Sweetness 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