Stephen King – The Dark Tower

who meant to get every word right. Outside, the storm still refused to break or to go away.

At last the gunslinger sat back. In the yellow glow of the candles, his face appeared both

ancient and strangely lovely. Looking at him, Eddie for the first time suspected there might

be more wrong with him than what Rosalita Munoz had called “the dry twist.” Roland had

lost weight, and the dark circles beneath his eyes whispered of illness. He drank off a whole glass of the red tea at a single draught, and asked: “Do you understand the things I’ve told

you?”

“Ayuh.” No more than that.

“Ken it very well, do ya?” Roland pressed. “No questions?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Tell it back to us, then.”

John had filled two pages with notes in his looping scrawl. Now he paged back and forth

between them, nodding to himself a couple of times. Then he grunted and returned the pad

to his hip pocket.He may be a country cousin, but he’s a long way from stupid, Eddie

thought.And meeting him was a long way from just luck; that was ka having a very good

day.

“Go to New York,” John said. “Find this fella Aaron Deepneau. Keep his buddy out of it.

Convince Deepneau that takin care of the rose in that vacant lot is just about the most

important job in the world.”

“You can cut the just-about,” Eddie said.

John nodded as if that went without saying. He picked up the piece of notepaper with the

cartoon beaver on top and tucked it into his voluminous wallet. Passing the bill of sale to

him had been one of the harder things Eddie Dean had had to do since being sucked

through the unfound door and into East Stoneham, and he came close to snatching it back

before it could disappear into the caretaker’s battered old Lord Buxton. He thought he

understood much better now about how Calvin Tower had felt.

“Because you boys now own the lot, you own the rose,” John said.

“The Tet Corporation now owns the rose,” Eddie said. “A corporation of which you’re

about to become executive vice-president.”

John Cullum looked unimpressed with his putative new title. He said, “Deepneau’s

supposed to draw up articles of incorporation and make sure Tet’s legal. Then we go to see

this fella Moses Carver and make surehe gets on board. That’s apt to be the hard

part—”Haa-aad paa-aat “—but we’ll give it our best go.”

“Put Auntie’s cross around your neck,” Roland said, “and when you meet with sai Carver,

show it to him. It may go a long way toward convincing him you’re on the straight. But first

you must blow on it, like this.”

On their ride from Bridgton, Roland had asked Eddie if he could think of any secret—no

matter how trivial or great—which Susannah and her godfather might have shared in

common. As a matter of fact Eddie did know such a secret, and he was now astounded to

hear Susannah speak it from the cross which lay on Dick Beckhardt’s pine table.

“We buried Pimsy under the apple tree, where he could watch the blossoms fall in the

spring,” her voice said. “And Daddy Mose told me not to cry anymore, because God thinks

to mourn a pet too long…”

Here the words faded away, first to a mutter and then to nothing at all. But Eddie

remembered the rest and repeated it now: “ ‘…to mourn a pet too long’s a sin.’ She said

Daddy Mose told her she could go to Pimsy’s grave once in awhile and whisper ‘Be happy

in heaven’ but never to tell anyone else, because preachers don’t hold much with the idea

of animals going to heaven. And she kept the secret. I was the only one she ever told.”

Eddie, perhaps remembering that post-coital confidence in the dark of night, was smiling

painfully.

John Cullum looked at the cross, then up at Roland, wide-eyed. “What is it? Some kind of

tape recorder? It ain’t, is it?”

“It’s a sigul,” Roland said patiently. “One that may help you with this fellow Carver, if he

turns out to be what Eddie calls ‘a hardass.’ ” The gunslinger smiled a little.Hardass was a

term he liked. One he understood. “Put it on.”

But Cullum didn’t, at least not at once. For the first time since the old fellow had come into their acquaintance—including that period when they’d been under fire in the General

Store—he looked genuinely discomposed. “Is it magic?” he asked.

Roland shrugged impatiently, as if to tell John that the word had no useful meaning in this

context, and merely repeated: “Put it on.”

Gingerly, as if he thought Aunt Talitha’s cross might glow redhot at any moment and give

him a serious burn, John Cullum did as bid. He bent his head to look down at it

(momentarily giving his long Yankee face an amusing burgher’s double chin), then tucked

it into his shirt.

“Gorry,” he said again, very softly.

Six

Aware that he was speaking now as once he’d been spoken to, Eddie Dean said: “Tell the

rest of your lesson, John of East Stoneham, and be true.”

Cullum had gotten out of bed that morning no more than a country caretaker, one of the

world’s unknown and unseen. He’d go to bed tonight with the potential of becoming one of

the world’s most important people, a true prince of the Earth. If he was afraid of the idea, it didn’t show. Perhaps he hadn’t grasped it yet.

But Eddie didn’t believe that. This was the man ka had put in their road, and he was both

trig and brave. If Eddie had been Walter at this moment (or Flagg, as Walter sometimes

called himself), he believed he would have trembled.

“Well,” John said, “it don’t mind a mite to ya who runs the company, but you want Tet to

swallow up Holmes, because from now on the job doesn’t have anything to do with makin

toothpaste and cappin teeth, although it may go on lookin that way yet awhile.”

“And what’s—”

Eddie got no further. John raised a gnarled hand to stop him. Eddie tried to imagine a

Texas Instruments calculator in that hand and discovered he could, and quite easily. Weird.

“Gimme a chance, youngster, and I’ll tell you.”

Eddie sat back, making a zipping motion across his lips.

“Keep the rose safe, that’s first. Keep thewritah safe, that’s second. But beyond that, me

and this guy Deepneau and this other guy Carver are s’posed to build up one of the world’s

most powerful corporations. We trade in real estate, we work with…uh…” He pulled out

the battered green pad, consulted it quickly, and put it away. “We work with ‘software developers,’ whatever they are, because they’re gonna be the next wave of technology.

We’re supposed to remember three words.” He ticked them off. “Microsoft. Microchips.

Intel. And n’matter how big we grow—or howfast —our three real jobs are the same:

protect the rose, protect Stephen King, and try to screw over two other companies every

chance we get. One’s called Sombra. Other’s…” There was the slightest of hesitations.

“The other’s North Central Positronics. Sombra’s mostly interested in proppity, accordin

to you fellas. Positronics…well, science and gadgets, that’s obvious even to me. If Sombra

wants a piece of land, Tet tries t’get it first. If North Central wants a patent, we try to get it first, or at least to frig it up for them. Throw it to a third party if it comes to that.”

Eddie was nodding approval. He hadn’t told John that last, the old guy had come up with it

on his own.

“We’re the Three Toothless Musketeers, the Old Farts of the Apocalypse, and we’re

supposed to keep those two outfits from gettin what they want, by fair means or foul. Dirty

tricks most definitely allowed.” John grinned. “I never been to Harvard Business

School”—Haa-vid Bi’ness School—“but I guess I can kick a fella in the crotch as well’s

anyone.”

“Good,” Roland said. He started to get up. “I think it’s time we—”

Eddie raised a hand to stop him. Yes, he wanted to get to Susannah and Jake; couldn’t wait

to sweep his darling into his arms and cover her face with kisses. It seemed years since he

had last seen her on the East Road in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Yet he couldn’t leave it at this as easily as Roland, who had spent his life being obeyed and had come to take the

death-allegiance of complete strangers as a matter of course. What Eddie saw on the other

side of Dick Beckhardt’s table wasn’t another tool but an independent Yankee who was

tough-minded and smart as a whip…but really too old for what they were asking. And

speaking of too old, what about Aaron Deepneau, the Chemotherapy Kid?

“My friend wants to get moving and so do I,” Eddie said. “We’ve got miles to go yet.”