Stephen King – The Dark Tower

She looked at him with an expression of sorrow and her mouth moved, but Eddie could

hear nothing. He raised his fist to his forehead and bent his leg. Then he touched the corner of one eye and pointed to her.I see you, the gesture said…or so he hoped.I see you very

well . The woman bearing the dead or sleeping child returned the gesture, and then passed

from sight.

Overhead, thunder cracked sharply and lightning flashed down into the center of the glow.

An ancient fir tree, its lusty trunk girdled with moss, took the bolt and split apart down its center, falling half one way and half the other. The inside was on fire. And a great gust of

sparks—not fire, not this, but something with the ethereal quality of swamplight—went

twisting up toward the hanging swags of the clouds. In those sparks Eddie saw tiny dancing

bodies, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. It was like watching a squadron of Tinker

Bells, there and then gone.

“Look at em,” John said reverently. “Walk-ins! Gorry, there’shundreds! I wish my friend

Donnie was here to see.”

Eddie thought he was probably right: hundreds of men, women, and children were

walking through the woods below them, walking through the light, appearing and

disappearing and then appearing again. As he watched, he felt a cold drop of water splash

his neck, followed by a second and a third. The wind swooped down through the trees,

provoking another upward gush of those fairy-like creatures and turning the tree that had

been halved by lightning into a pair of vast crackling torches.

“Come on,” Roland said, grabbing Eddie’s arm. “It’s going to come a downpour and

this’ll go out like a candle. If we’re still on this side when it does, we’ll be stuck here.”

“Where—” Eddie began, and then he saw. Near the foot of the driveway, where the forest

cover gave way to a tumble of rocks falling down to the lake, was the core of the glow, for

the time being too bright to look at. Roland dragged him in that direction. John Cullum

remained hypnotized for a moment longer by the walk-ins, then tried to follow them.

“No!” Roland called over his shoulder. The rain was falling harder now, the drops cold on

his skin and the size of coins. “You have your work, John! Fare you well!”

“And you, boys!” John called back. He stopped and raised his hand in a wave. A bolt of

electricity cut across the sky, momentarily lighting his face in brilliant blue and deepest

black. “And you!”

“Eddie, we’re going to run into the core of the light,” Roland said. “It’s not a door of the

old people but of thePrim —thatis magic, do ye ken. It’ll take us to the place we want, if we concentrate hard enough.”

“Where—”

“There’s no time! Jake’s told me where, by touch! Only hold my hand and keep your mind

blank! I can take us!”

Eddie wanted to ask him if he was absolutely sure of that, but there was no time. Roland

broke into a run. Eddie joined him. They sprinted down the slope and into the light. Eddie

felt it breathing over his skin like a million small mouths. Their boots crackled in the deep

leaf cover. To his right was the burning tree. He could smell the sap and the sizzle of its

cooking bark. Now they closed in on the core of the light. At first Eddie could see Kezar

Lake through it and then he felt an enormous force grip him and pull him forward through

the cold rain and into that brilliant murmuring glare. For just a moment he glimpsed the

shape of a doorway. Then he redoubled his grip on Roland’s hand and closed his eyes. The

leaf-littered ground ran out beneath his feet and they were flying.

Chapter VII:

Reunion

One

Flaherty stood at the New York/Fedic door, which had been scarred by several gunshots

but otherwise stood whole against them, an impassable barrier which the shitting kid had

somehow passed. Lamla stood silent beside him, waiting for Flaherty’s rage to exhaust

itself. The others also waited, maintaining the same prudent silence.

Finally the blows Flaherty had been raining on the door began to slow. He administered

one final overhand smash, and Lamla winced as blood flew from the hume’s knuckles.

“What?” Flaherty asked, catching his grimace.“What? Do you have something to say?”

Lamla cared not at all for the white circles around Flaherty’s eyes and the hard red roses in Flaherty’s cheeks. Least of all for the way Flaherty’s hand had risen to the butt of the Glock automatic hanging beneath his armpit. “No,” he said. “No, sai.”

“Go on, say what’s on your mind, do it please ya,” Flaherty persisted. He tried to smile and

produced a gruesome grin instead—the leer of a madman. Quietly, with barely a rustle, the

rest pulled back. “Others will have plenty to say; why shouldn’t you start, my cully? I lost

him! Be the first to carp, you ugly motherfucker!”

I’m dead,Lamla thought.After a life of service to the King, one unguarded expression in the presence of a man who needs a scapegoat, and I’m dead.

He looked around, verifying that none of the others would step in for him, and then said:

“Flaherty, if I’ve offended you in some way I’m sor—”

“Oh, you’veoffended me, sure enough!” Flaherty shrieked, his Boston accent growing

thicker as his rage escalated. “I’m sure I’ll pay for tonight’s work, aye, but I think you’ll pay fir—”

There was a kind of gasp in the air around them, as if the corridor itself had inhaled sharply.

Flaherty’s hair and Lamla’s fur rippled. Flaherty’s posse of low men and vampires began to

turn. Suddenly one of them, a vamp named Albrecht, shrieked and bolted forward,

allowing Flaherty a view of two newcomers, men with raindrops still fresh and dark on

their jeans and boots and shirts. There was trail-dusty gunna-gar at their feet and revolvers hung at their hips. Flaherty saw the sandalwood grips in the instant before the younger one

drew, faster than blue blazes, and understood at once why Albrecht had run. Only one sort

of man carried guns that looked like that.

The young one fired a single shot. Albrecht’s blond hair jumped as if flicked by an

invisible hand and then he collapsed forward, fading within his clothes as he did so.

“Hile, you bondsmen of the King,” the older one said. He spoke in a purely conversational

tone. Flaherty—his hands still bleeding from his extravagant drumming on the door

through which the snot-babby had disappeared—could not seem to get the sense of him. It

was the one of whom they had been warned, surely it was Roland of Gilead, but how had he

gotten here, and on their blindside?How?

Roland’s cold blue eyes surveyed them. “Which of this sorry herd calls himself dinh? Will

that one honor us by stepping forward or not? Not?” His eyes surveyed them; his left hand

departed the vicinity of his gun and journeyed to the corner of his mouth, where a small

sarcastic smile had bloomed. “Not? Too bad. Th’art cowards after all, I’m sorry to see.

Thee’d kill a priest and chase a lad but not stand and claim thy day’s work. Th’art cowards

and the sons of cow—”

Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around the butt of

the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker’s clutch. “That would be me,

Roland-of-Steven.”

“You know my name, do you?”

“Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. T’is the same as the

mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee until he spewed ’is—”

Flaherty drew as he spoke, a bushwhacker’s trick he’d no doubt practiced and used before

to advantage. And although he was fast and the forefinger of Roland’s left hand still

touched the side of his mouth when Flaherty’s draw began, the gunslinger beat him easily.

His first bullet passed between the lips of Jake’s chief harrier, exploding the teeth at the

front of his upper jaw to bone fragments which Flaherty drew down his throat with his

dying breath. His second pierced Flaherty’s forehead between the eyebrows and he was

flung back against the New York/Fedic door with the unfired Glock spilling from his hand

to discharge a final time on the hallway floor.

Most of the others drew a split-second later. Eddie killed the six in front, having taken time to reload the chamber he’d fired at Albrecht. When the revolver was empty, he rolled

behind his dinh to reload, as he had been taught. Roland picked off the next five, then rolled smoothly behind Eddie, who took out the rest save one.

Lamla had been too cunning to try and so was the last standing. He raised his empty hands,