Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“OH DEAR, STILL HERE!”Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking

amusement into his voice. It wasn’t easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.

Another crazed scream in response—“EEEEEEEEE!”Roland was amazed that the Red

King didn’t split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he’d

emptied—he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could—and this time there was a

double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the

rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the

pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and

waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted

water in response to that high, approaching whistle, and he must not let them. If he ever

needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he’d been famous in his time, this was

it.

Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time

one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first

one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs

outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and

steady, his eye filled with all the world’s clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up,

blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while

the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.

He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost

jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old

man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a

luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King’s back almost all the way

to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a

robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols.

To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he

looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.

“HOW SLOW YOU ARE!”the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement.“TRY

THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!”

Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side.

Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face

in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure’s

feet, but wasn’t entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony’s floor and its

railing obscured it.

Must be his ammunition supply,he thought. Mustbe. How many can he have in a crate that

size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn’t matter. Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at

a time, Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his

way. This was, after all, what he’d been made for.

Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.

The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his

dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then,

however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony’s railing…and

then peer directly into the gunslinger’s eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland

lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.

The King’s call drifted to him.“WAIT THEN, A BIT—AND MEDITATE ON WHAT

YOU’D GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND…LISTEN! HEAR THE

SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!”

He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches.

What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind…and what the King wanted him to

hear.

The call of the Tower.

Come, Roland,sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can’-Ka No Rey, they came

from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that

for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach…that which was being

held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do

his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because

the calling voices weren’t constant. At their current level he could withstand them.Was

withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, the level of the call grew stronger. He

began to understand—and with growing horror—why in his dreams and visions he had

always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky

seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up

by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon.

He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Tower’s strengthening

call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able

to stop him.

Come…come…becameCOME…COME… and thenCOME! COME! His head ached

with it. Andfor it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself

to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid.

Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to

that call—Roland understood this—but he knew what was happening.

Five

They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried

another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked

back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took

the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least

there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed.

“TRY AGAIN!”he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were

carrying—the air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one

was a dagger pricking the old lunatic’s flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the

Tower was growing steadily stronger.

“COME, GUNSLINGER!”the madman’s voice coaxed.“PERHAPS I’LL LET THEE

COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT,

COULD WE NOT?”

To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice.

Yes,he thought grimly.And we’ll have coffee. Perhaps even a little fry-up .

He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running

briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse.

The call of the Tower

(come, Roland come, gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey’s done)

was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the

unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end

of the rose-field.

And the torture continued.

Six

He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near

the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that something would occur to him, some

brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc

of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The

hands of the pocket-watch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning.

And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might

the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag, he

would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he

would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown

out of his boots.

He would die among the roses.

“Patrick,” he said. His voice was husky.

Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boy’s hands—dirty,

scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his own—and gave in. It occurred to him