Stephen King – The Dark Tower

The birds have fallen silent. Overhead another of those great waggons rolls its solemn

course, and in its wake—hark!—we hear an engine. Soon enough John Cullum’s dusty

Ford Galaxie appears with Eddie Dean’s anxious face rising behind the wheel and the

headlights shining in the premature gathering dark.

Two

Eddie opened his mouth to ask Roland how far they were going, but of course he knew.

Turtleback Lane’s south end was marked by a sign bearing a large black 1, and each of the

driveways splitting off lakeward to their left bore another, higher number. They caught

glimpses of the water through the trees, but the houses themselves were below them on the

slope and tucked out of sight. Eddie seemed to taste ozone and electric grease with every

breath he drew, and twice patted the hair on the nape of his neck, sure it would be standing

on end. It wasn’t, but knowing it didn’t change the nervous, witchy feeling of exhilaration

that kept sweeping through him, lighting up his solar plexus like an overloaded

circuit-breaker and spreading out from there. It was the storm, of course; he just happened

to be one of those people who feel them coming along the ends of their nerves. But never

one’s approach as strongly as this.

It’s not all the storm, and you know it.

No, of course not. Although he thought all those wild volts might somehow have

facilitated his contact with Susannah. It came and went like the reception you sometimes

got from distant radio stations at night, but since their meeting with

(Ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost)

Chevin of Chayven, it had become much stronger. Because this whole part of Maine was

thin, he suspected, and close to many worlds. Just as their ka-tet was close to whole again.

For Jake was with Susannah, and the two of them seemed to be safe enough for the time

being, with a solid door between them and their pursuers. Yet there was something ahead

of those two, as well—something Susannah either didn’t want to talk about or couldn’t

make clear. Even so, Eddie had sensed both her horror of it and her terror that it might

come back, and he thought he knew what it was: Mia’s baby. Which had been Susannah’s

as well in some way he still didn’t fully understand. Why an armed woman should be afraid

of an infant, Eddie didn’t know, but he was sure that if she was, there must be a good reason for it.

They passed a sign that saidFENN , 11, and another that saidISRAEL , 12. Then they came

around a curve and Eddie stamped on the Galaxie’s brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the side of the road beside a sign readingBECKHARDT , 13, was a

familiar Ford pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the

truck’s rust-spotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue chambray shirt

buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, wattled neck. He also wore a Boston Red Sox cap

tilted just a little to one side as if to sayI got the drop on you, partner . He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and

good-humored face on the breathless pre-storm air.

All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up nerves, aware that he was smiling as

you do when you come across an old friend in a strange place—the Pyramids of Egypt, the

marketplace in old Tangiers, maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane

in Lovell on a thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also

smiling. Old long, tall, and ugly—smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed.

They got out of the car and approached John Cullum. Roland raised a fist to his forehead

and bent his knee a little. “Hile, John! I see you very well.”

“Ayuh, see you, too,” John Cullum said. “Clear as day.” He skimmed a salute outward

from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he dipped his

chin in Eddie’s direction. “Young fella.”

“Long days and pleasant nights,” Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He

was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.

“That’s a pretty thing to say,” John remarked. Then: “I beat you here. Kinda thought I

might.”

Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering

darkness in the sky above it. “I don’t think this is quite the place…?” In his voice was the

barest touch of a question.

“Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up,” John agreed, puffing his pipe. “I

passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver,

we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but

gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it.” For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in a jar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.

“Why?” he asked. “What’s up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a door?” The idea occurred to

him…and then seized him. “Itis a door, isn’t it? And it’s open!”

John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider. “Might be a door,” he said,

stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day:doe-ahh . “Doesn’t exactlylook like a door, but…ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in

that light?” He appeared to calculate. “Ayuh. But I think you boys want to palaver, and if

we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won’t be no palaver; just you standin there with your

jaws dropped.” Cullum threw back his head and laughed. “Me, too!”

“What’s Cara Laughs?” Eddie asked.

John shrugged. “A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s

because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right

now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale.

They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she…” He made a bottle-tipping

motion.

Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn’t

understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the

walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum

had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number

at the head of the driveway was 19.

He looked up and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West

toward the White Mountains, too—what was almost surely called the Discordia in a world

not far from here—and along the Path of the Beam.

Always along the Path of the Beam.

“What do you suggest, John?” Roland asked.

Cullum nodded at the sign readingBECKHARDT . “I’ve care-took for Dick Beckhardt

since the late fifties,” he said. “Helluva nice man. He’s in Wasin’ton now, doin something

with the Carter administration.”Caaa-tah . “I got a key. I think maybe we ought to go on

down there. It’s warm n dry, and I don’t think it’s gonna be either one out here before long.

You boys c’n tell your tale, and I c’n listen—which is a thing I do tol’ably well—and then

we can all take a run up to Cara. I…well I justnever …” He shook his head, took his pipe

out of his mouth, and looked at them with naked wonder. “I never seen the beat of it, I tell

you. It was like I didn’t even know how to look at it.”

“Come on,” Roland said. “We’ll all ride down in your cartomobile, if it does ya.”

“Does me just fine,” John said, and got into the back.

Three

Dick Beckhardt’s cottage was half a mile down, pine-walled, cozy. There was a

pot-bellied stove in the living room and a braided rug on the floor. The west-facing wall

was glass from end to end and Eddie had to stand there for a moment, looking out, in spite

of the urgency of their errand. The lake had gone a shade of dead ebony that was somehow

frightening—like the eye of a zombie,he thought, and had no idea why he thought it. He

had an idea that if the wind picked up (as it would surely do when the rain came), the

whitecaps would ruffle the surface and make it easier to look at. Would take away that look

of something looking back atyou.

John Cullum sat at Dick Beckhardt’s table of polished pine, took off his hat, and held it in