Stephen King – The Dark Tower

matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of

alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can

hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so

swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to

protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at

least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.

“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”

“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”

Seven

The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the

ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone. He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower

after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.

Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family.They like to boast that they have the

most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States. It simply reads

“DEEPNEAU.”

“Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her. “Surely not, you’re too young.

His granddaughter?”

Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain. I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who

mostly raised me.”

“Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.

“As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning.

“Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A little frightened, but pleased.”

Roland shook her hand, but the gesture was perfunctory, hardly more than a touch. Then,

with considerably more feeling (for this was the ritual he had grown up with, the one he

understood), he placed his fist against his forehead and made a leg. “Long days and

pleasant nights, Nancy Deepneau.”

Her smile widened into a cheerful grin. “And may you have twice the number, Roland of

Gilead! May you have twice the number.”

The ele-vaydor came, they got on, and it was to the ninety-ninth floor that they went.

Eight

The doors opened on a large round foyer. The floor was carpeted in a dusky pink shade

that exactly matched the hue of the rose. Across from the ele-vaydor was a glass door

withTHE TET CORPORATION lettered on it. Beyond, Roland saw another, smaller lobby

where a woman sat at a desk, apparently talking to herself. To the right of the outer lobby

door were two men wearing business suits. They were chatting to each other, hands in

pockets, seemingly relaxed, but Roland saw they were anything but. And they were armed.

The coats of their suits were well-tailored, but a man who knows how to look for a gun

usually sees one, if a gun is there. These two fellows would stand in this foyer for an hour, maybe two (it was difficult for even good men to remain totally alert for much longer),

falling into their little just-chatting routine each time the ele-vaydor came, ready to move

instantly if they smelled something wrong. Roland approved.

He didn’t spend much time looking at the guards, however. Once he had identified them

for what they were, he let his gaze go where it had wanted to be from the moment the

ele-vaydor doors opened. There was a large black-and-white picture on the wall to his left.

This was a photograph (he had originally thought the word wasfottergraf ) about five feet

long and three wide, mounted without a frame, curved so cunningly to the shape of the wall

that it looked like a hole into some unnaturally still reality. Three men in jeans and

open-necked shirts sat on the top rail of a fence, their boots hooked under the lowest rail.

How many times, Roland wondered, had he seen cowboys orpastorillas sitting just that

way while they watched branding, roping, gelding, or the breaking of wild horses? How

many times had he sat so himself, sometimes with one or more of his old tet—Cuthbert,

Alain, Jamie DeCurry—sitting to either side of him, as John Cullum and Aaron Deepneau

sat flanking the black man with the gold-rimmed spectacles and the tiny white moustache?

The remembering made him ache, and this was no mere ache of the mind; his stomach

clenched and his heart sped up. The three in the picture had been caught laughing at something, and the result was a kind of timeless perfection, one of those rare moments

when men are glad to be what they are and where they are.

“The Founding Fathers,” Nancy said. She sounded both amused and sad. “That photo was

taken on an executive retreat in 1986. Taos, New Mexico. Three city boys in cow country,

how about that. And don’t they look like they’re having the time of their lives?”

“You say true,” Roland said.

“Do you know all three?”

Roland nodded. He knew them, all right, although he had never met Moses Carver, the

man in the middle. Dan Holmes’s partner, Odetta Holmes’s godfather. In the picture he

looked to be a robust and healthy seventy, but surely by 1986 he had to be closer to eighty.

Perhaps eighty-five. Of course, Roland reminded himself, there was a wild card here: the

marvelous thing he’d just seen in the lobby of this building. The rose was no more a

fountain of youth than the turtle in the little pocket park across the street was the real

Maturin, but did he think it had certain beneficent qualities? Yes he did. Certain healing

qualities? Yes he did. Did he believe that the nine years of life Aaron Deepneau had gotten

between 1977 and the taking of this picture in 1986 had just been a matter of thePrim

-replacing pills and medical treatments of the old people? No he did not. These three

men—Carver, Cullum, and Deepneau—had come together, almost magically, to fight for

the rose in their old age. Their tale, the gunslinger believed, would make a book in itself,

very likely a fine and exciting one. What Roland believed was simplicity itself: the rose

had shown its gratitude.

“When did they die?” he asked Nancy Deepneau.

“John Cullum went first, in 1989,” she said. “Victim of a gunshot wound. He lasted twelve

hours in the hospital, long enough for everyone to say goodbye. He was in New York for

the annual board meeting. According to the NYPD, it was a streetside mugging gone bad.

We believe he was killed by an agent of either Sombra or North Central Positronics.

Probably one of the can-toi. There were other attempts that missed.”

“Both Sombra and Positronics come to the same thing,” said Roland. “They’re the

agencies of the Crimson King in this world.”

“We know,” she said, then pointed to the man on the left side of the picture, the one she so

strongly resembled. “Uncle Aaron lived until 1992. When you met him…in 1977?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“In 1977, no one would have believed he could live so long.”

“Did thefayen-folken kill him, too?”

“No, the cancer came back, that’s all. He died in his bed. I was there. The last thing he said was, ‘Tell Roland we did our best.’ And so I do tell you.”

“Thankee-sai.” He heard the roughness in his voice and hoped she would mistake it for

curtness. Many had done their best for him, was it not true? A great many, beginning with

Susan Delgado, all those years ago.

“Are you all right?” she asked in a low, sympathetic voice.

“Yes,” he said. “Fine. And Moses Carver? When didhe pass?”

She raised her eyebrows, then laughed.

“What—?”

“Look for yourself!”

She pointed toward the glass doors. Now approaching them from the inside, passing the

desk-minding woman who had apparently been talking to herself, was a wizened man with

fluffy fly-away hair and white eyebrows to match. His skin was dark, but the woman upon

whose arm he leaned was even darker. He was tall—perhaps six-and-three, if the bend had

been taken out of his spine—but the woman was even taller, at least six-and-six. Her face

was not beautiful but almost savagely handsome. The face of a warrior.

The face of a gunslinger.

Nine

Had Moses Carver’s spine been straight, he and Roland would have been eye-to-eye. As it

was, Carver needed to look up slightly, which he did by cocking his head, birdlike. He

seemed incapable of actually bending his neck; arthritis had locked it in place. His eyes

were brown, the whites so muddy it was difficult to tell where the irises ended, and they

were full of merry laughter behind their gold-rimmed spectacles. He still had the tiny white

moustache.

“Roland of Gilead!” said he. “How I’ve longed to meet you, sir! I b’lieve it’s what’s kept