Stephen King – The Dark Tower

appropriated the tapestry of the vampire-knights at dinner had very likely taken

thesköldpadda as well, not knowing what it was, only knowing it was something strange

and wonderful and otherworldly. Too bad. It might have come in handy.

The gunslinger moved on, weaving his way among the tables with Oy trotting at his heel.

Seventeen

He paused in the kitchen long enough to wonder what the constabulary of New York had

made of it. He was willing to bet they had never seen another like it, not in this city of clean machinery and bright electric lights. This was a kitchen in which Hax, the cook he

remembered best from his youth (and beneath whose dead feet he and his best friend had

once scattered bread for the birds), would have felt at home. The cookfires had been out for

weeks, but the smell of the meat that had been roasted here—some of the variety known as

long pork—was strong and nasty. There were more signs of trouble here, as well (a

scum-caked pot lying on the green tiles of the floor, blood which had been burned black on

one of the stovetops), and Roland could imagine Jake fighting his way through the kitchen.

But not in panic; no, not he. Instead he had paused to demand directions of the cook’s boy.

What’s your name, cully?

Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa.

Jake had told them this part of his story, but it was not memory that spoke to Roland now.

It was the voices of the dead. He had heard such voices before, and knew them for what

they were.

Eighteen

Oy took the lead as he had done the last time he had been here. He could still smell Ake’s

scent, faint and sorrowful. Ake had gone on ahead now, but not so very far; he was good,

Ake was good, Ake would wait, and when the time came—when the job Ake had given

him was done—Oy would catch up and go with him as before. His nose was strong, and he

would find fresher scent than this when the time came to search for it. Ake had saved him

from death, which did not matter. Ake had saved him from loneliness and shame after Oy

had been cast out by the tet of his kind, and that did.

In the meantime, there was this job to finish. He led the man Olan into the pantry. The

secret door to the stairs had been closed, but the man Olan felt patiently along the shelves

of cans and boxes until he found the way to open it. All was as it had been, the long,

descending stair dimly lit by overhead bulbs, the scent damp and overlaid with mold. He

could smell the rats which scuttered in the walls; rats and other things, too, some of them

bugs of the sort he had killed the last time he and Ake had come here. That had been good

killing, and he would gladly have more, if more were offered. Oy wished the bugs would

show themselves again and challenge him, but of course they didn’t. They were afraid, and

they were right to be afraid, for ever had his kind stood enemy to theirs.

He started down the stairs with the man Olan following behind.

Nineteen

They passed the deserted kiosk with its age-yellowed signs (NEW YORK SOUVENIRS,

LAST CHANCE, andVISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001), and fifteen minutes later—Roland

checked his new watch to be sure of the time—they came to a place where there was a good

deal of broken glass on the dusty corridor floor. Roland picked Oy up so he wouldn’t cut

the pads of his feet. On both walls he saw the shattered remains of what had been

glass-covered hatches of some kind. When he looked in, he saw complicated machinery.

They had almost caught Jake here, snared him in some kind of mind-trap, but once again

Jake had been clever enough and brave enough to get through.He survived everything but a

man too stupid and too careless to do the simple job of driving his bucka on an empty road,

Roland thought bitterly.And the man who brought him there—that man, too. Then Oy

barked at him and Roland realized that in his anger at Bryan Smith (and at himself), he was

squeezing the poor little fellow too tightly.

“Cry pardon, Oy,” he said, and put him down.

Oy trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the scattered

bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig. Here also, printed in the

dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor, were the tracks he and Eddie had made

when they arrived. Again he heard a ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been

the harriers’ leader.

I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. ’Tis the same as the mouth

of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee.

Roland turned the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da’

had put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared…which he did not)

and looked down into the dead face, which was already growing a crop of mold. Next to

him was the stoat-head taheen whose final proclamation had beenBe damned to you, then,

chary-ka . And beyond the heaped bodies of these two and their mates was the door that

would take him out of the Keystone World for good.

Assuming that it still worked.

Oy trotted to it and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting,

but his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed his hands

against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and troubled vibration. This

door was still working but might not be for much longer.

He closed his eyes and thought of his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed

(how soon before he had been promoted from the cradle he didn’t know, but surely not

long), her face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who

would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with her own;

daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland, singing him to sleep and

dreams of those lands only children know.

Baby-bunting, baby-dear,

Baby, bring your berries here.

Chussit, chissit, chassit!

Bring enough to fill your basket!

So far I’ve traveled,he thought with his hands splayed on the ghostwood door.So far I’ve

traveled and so many I’ve hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved

was saved by accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there’s this much:

I’ve come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if only Susannah will go

with me. Mayhap there’s still enough to fill my basket.

“Chassit,” Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap nimbly

through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and then stepped

through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still without a backward look.

Chapter IV:

Fedic (Two Views)

One

Look at how brilliant it is here!

When we came before, Fedic was shadowless and dull, but there was a reason for that: it

wasn’t the real Fedic but only a kind of todash substitute; a place Mia knew well and

remembered well (just as she remembered the castle allure, where she went often before

circumstances—in the person of Walter o’ Dim—gave her a physical body) and could thus

re-create. Today, however, the deserted village is almost too bright to look at (although

we’ll no doubt see better once our eyes have adjusted from the murk of Thunderclap and

the passage beneath the Dixie Pig). Every shadow is crisp; they might have been cut from

black felt and laid upon the oggan. The sky is a sharp and cloudless blue. The air is chill.

The wind whining around the eaves of the empty buildings and through the battlements of

Castle Discordia is autumnal and somehow introspective. Sitting in Fedic Station is an

atomic locomotive—what was called a hot-enj by the old people—with the wordsSPIRIT

OF TOPEKA written on both sides of the bullet nose. The slim pilot-house windows have

been rendered almost completely opaque by centuries of desert grit flung against the glass,

but little does that matter; theSpirit of Topeka has made her last trip, and even when shedid

run regularly, no mere hume ever guided her course. Behind the engine are only three cars.

There were a dozen when she set out from Thunderclap Station on her last run, and there

were a dozen when she arrived in sight of this ghost town, but…