Stephen King – The Dark Tower

watched him wait with the others clustered on the corner for theWALK light, then cross

with them, the leather bag slung over his shoulder bouncing lightly against his hip. She

watched him mount the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza and disappear inside. Then she

leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the voices sing. At some point she realized

that at least two of the words they were singing were the ones that made her name.

Five

It seemed to Roland that great multitudes offolken were streaming into the building, but

this was the perception of a man who had spent the latter years of his quest in mostly

deserted places. If he’d come at quarter to nine, while people were still arriving, instead of at quarter to eleven, he would have been stunned by the flood of bodies. Now most of those

who worked here were settled in their offices and cubicles, generating paper and bytes of

information.

The lobby windows were of clear glass and at least two stories high, perhaps three.

Consequently the lobby was full of light, and as he stepped inside, the grief that had

possessed him ever since kneeling by Eddie in the street of Pleasantville slipped away. In

here the singing voices were louder, not a chorus but a great choir. And, he saw, he wasn’t

the only one who heard them. On the street, people had been hurrying with their heads

down and looks of distracted concentration on their faces, as if they were deliberately not

seeing the delicate and perishable beauty of the day which had been given them; in here

they were helpless not to feel at least some of that to which the gunslinger was so

exquisitely attuned, and which he drank like water in the desert.

As if in a dream, he drifted across the rose-marble tile, hearing the echoing clack of his

bootheels, hearing the faint and shifting conversation of the Orizas in their pouch. He

thought,People who work here wish they lived here. They may not know it, exactly, but

they do. People who work here find excuses to work late. And they will live long and

productive lives.

In the center of the high, echoing room, the expensive marble floor gave way to a square of

humble dark earth. It was surrounded by ropes of wine-dark velvet, but Roland knew that

even the ropes didn’t need to be there. No one would transgress that little garden, not even

a suicidal can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were

three dwarf palm trees, and plants he hadn’t seen since leaving Gilead: Spathiphyllum, he

believed they had been called there, although they might not have the same name in this

world. There were other plants as well, but only one mattered.

In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose.

It hadn’t been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in 1977,

when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled with trash and

broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced the coming of Turtle Bay Luxury

Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate Associates. This

building, all one hundred stories of it, had been built instead, andaround the rose. Whatever business might be done here was secondary to that purpose.

2 Hammarskjöld Plaza was a shrine.

Six

There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he drew

glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself. Not for years—perhaps since his early teenage

years—had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-tapping distance of him

without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he surely should have—

The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had approached him was clearly

surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back

from the ceiling above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman’s

green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in them, but

still, first to be surprised, then tomiss like that—

He glanced down at the woman’s feet and got at least part of the answer. She was wearing

a kind of shoe he’d never seen before, something with deep foam soles and what might

have been canvas uppers. Shoes that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface.

As for the woman herself—

A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that he had “seen the boat

she came in,” as familial resemblance was sometimes expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis;

second, that a society of gunslingers was a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone

World, and he had just been accosted by one of them.

And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?

“I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,” Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”

The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped

away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him…although I

can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now

I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain. There’s a person who wants…” For a moment she

looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so

she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes

slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinkingIf it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “…a person who wants topalaver with you,” she finished.

“All right,” he said.

She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m

asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you

do it?”

Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve

ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth

well enough when I’m on this side.”

“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.” And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor—not earth that had

been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual

earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise

changed.

At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with

most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was

about to say so, to ask the woman with the faintly familiar face to read it to him, when the

letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was

writ there, and easily. When he had finished, it changed back again.

“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”

She smiled—her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff—and nodded. “Yes. If

you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have

been in Cyrillic.”

“Say true?”

“True.”

The lobby had regained its normal rhythm…except, Roland understood, the rhythm of this

place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap

would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and

ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned the nerves like brushfires as they made

their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity.

Thesefolken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to. They were the

lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it…which was luckiest of all. He

watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called ele-vaydors, moving

briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course

was a perfectly straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of

the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard

sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old. And it didn’t