Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“I know that. It’s on your face, son. Like a scar.”

Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something

that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder

cracked and lightning flashed.

“But why would you do this?” Eddie asked. “I have to know that. Why would you take all

this on for two men you just met?”

John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and would wear until his death in

the year of 1989—the cross given to Roland by an old woman in a forgotten town. He

would touch it just that way in the years ahead when contemplating some big decision (the

biggest might have been the one to sever Tet’s connection with IBM, a company that had

shown an ever-increasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or preparing for some covert action (the fire-bombing of Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi,

for instance, in the year before he died). The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke

again in Cullum’s presence no matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to

sleep with his hand clasped around it, he would think:’Tis a sigul. ’Tis a sigul,

dear—something that came from another world.

If he had regrets toward the end (other than about some of the tricks, which were filthy

indeed and cost more than one man his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the

world on the other side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the

town of Lovell. From time to time Roland’s sigul sent him dreams of a field filled with

roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible visions of two

crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly scanning the horizon.

Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound of a man relentlessly winding

his horn. From these latter dreams he would awake with tears on his cheeks, those of

longing and loss and love. He would awake with his hand closed around the cross,

thinkingI denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the

Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger’s ka-tet and the White and

never once questioned the choice.

Yet for all that he wished he could have walked out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door.

Now he said: “You boys want all the right things. I can’t put it any clearer than that. I

believe you.” He hesitated. “I believein you. What I see in your eyes is true.”

Eddie thought he was done, and then Cullum grinned like a boy.

“Also it ’pears to me you’re offerin the keys to one humongous great engine.”Engyne .

“Who wouldn’t want to turn it on, and see what it does?”

“Are you scared?” Roland asked.

John Cullum considered the question, then nodded. “Ayuh,” he said.

Roland nodded. “Good,” he said.

Seven

They drove back up to Turtleback Lane in Cullum’s car beneath a black, boiling sky.

Although this was the height of the summer season and most of the cottages on Kezar were

probably occupied, they saw not a single car moving in either direction. All the boats on the lake had long since run for cover.

“Said I had somethin else for ya,” John said, and went to the back of his truck, where there

was a steel lockbox snugged up against the cab. Now the wind had begun to blow. It

swirled his scanty fluff of white hair around his head. He ran a combination, popped a padlock, and swung back the lockbox’s lid. From inside he brought out two dusty bags the

wanderers knew well. One looked almost new compared to the other, which was the

scuffed no-color of desert dust and laced its long length with rawhide.

“Our gunna!” Eddie cried, so delighted—and soamazed —that the words almost came out

in a scream. “How in the name ofhell —?”

John offered them a smile that augured well for his future as a dirty trickster: bemused on

the surface, sly beneath. “Nice surprise, ain’t it? Thought so m’self. I went back to get a

look at Chip’s store—what ’us left of it—while there was still a lot of confusion. People

runnin hither, thither, and yon is what I mean to say; coverin bodies, stringin that yella tape, takin pitchers. Somebody’d put those bags off to one side and they looked just a dight

lonely, so I…” He shrugged one bony shoulder. “I scooped em up.”

“This would have been while we were visiting with Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau in

their rented cabin,” Eddie said. “Afteryou went back home, supposedly to pack for

Vermont. Is that right?” He was stroking the side of his bag. He knew that smooth surface

very well; hadn’t he shot the deer it had come from and scraped off the hair with Roland’s

knife and stitched the hide himself, with Susannah to help him? Not long after the great

robot bear Shardik had almost unzipped Eddie’s guts, that had been. Sometime in the last

century, it seemed.

“Yuh,” Cullum said, and when the old fellow’s smile sweetened, Eddie’s last doubts about

him departed. They had found the right man for this world. Say true and thank Gan big-big.

“Strap on your gun, Eddie,” Roland said, holding out the revolver with the worn

sandalwood grips.

Mine. Now he calls it mine.Eddie felt a small chill.

“I thought we were going to Susannah and Jake.” But he took the revolver and belted it on

willingly enough.

Roland nodded. “But I believe we have a little work to do first, against those who killed

Callahan and then tried to kill Jake.” His face didn’t change as he spoke, but both Eddie

Dean and John Cullum felt a chill. For a moment it was almost impossible to look at the

gunslinger.

So came—although they did not know it, which was likely more mercy than such as they

deserved—the death sentence of Flaherty, the taheen Lamla, and their ka-tet.

Eight

Oh my God,Eddie tried to say, but no sound came out.

He had seen brightness growing ahead of them as they drove north along Turtleback Lane, following the one working taillight of Cullum’s truck. At first he thought it might be the

carriage-lamps guarding some rich man’s driveway, then perhaps floodlights. But the glow

kept strengthening, a blue-golden brilliance to their left, where the ridge sloped down to the lake. As they approached the source of the light (Cullum’s pickup now barely crawling),

Eddie gasped and pointed as a circle of radiance broke free of the main body and flew

toward them, changing colors as it came: blue to gold to red, red to green to gold and back

to blue. In the center of it was something that looked like an insect with four wings. Then,

as it soared above the bed of Cullum’s truck and into the dark woods on the east side of the

road, it looked toward them and Eddie saw the insect had a human face.

“What…dear God, Roland,what —”

“Taheen,” Roland said, and said no more. In the growing brilliance his face was calm and

tired.

More circles of light broke free of the main body and streamed across the road in cometary

splendor. Eddie saw flies and tiny jeweled hummingbirds and what appeared to be winged

frogs. Beyond them…

The taillight of Cullum’s truck flashed bright, but Eddie was so busy goggling that he

would have rear-ended the man had Roland not spoken to him sharply. Eddie threw the

Galaxie into Park without bothering to either set the emergency brake or turn off the engine.

Then he got out and walked toward the blacktop driveway that descended the steep wooded

slope. His eyes were huge in the delicate light, his mouth hung open. Cullum joined him

and stood looking down. The driveway was flanked by two signs:CARA LAUGHS on the

left and19 on the right.

“Somethin, ain’t it?” Cullum asked quietly.

You gotthatright, Eddie tried to reply, and still no words would come out of his mouth,

only a breathless wheeze.

Most of the light was coming from the woods to the east of the road and to the left of the

Cara Laughs driveway. Here the trees—mostly pines, spruces, and birches bent from a

late-winter ice storm—were spread far apart, and hundreds of figures walked solemnly

among them as though in a rustic ballroom, their bare feet scuffing through the leaves.

Some were pretty clearly Children of Roderick, and as roont as Chevin of Chayven. Their

skins were covered with the sores of radiation sickness and very few had more than a

straggle of hair, but the light in which they walked gave them a beauty that was almost too

great to look upon. Eddie saw a one-eyed woman carrying what appeared to be a dead child.