Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Mathiessen van Wyck, who had given her his money and rented her a hotel room. The

gunslinger asked Eddie about the turtle in the lining of the bag.

“I didn’tknow it was a turtle. I thought it might be a stone.”

“If you’d tell this part again, I’d hear,” Roland said.

So, thinking carefully, trying to remember completely (for it all seemed a very long time

ago), Eddie related how he and Pere Callahan had gone up to the Doorway Cave and

opened the ghostwood box with Black Thirteen inside. They’d expected Black Thirteen to

open the door, and so it had, but first—

“We put the box in the bag,” Eddie said. “The one that saidNOTHING BUT STRIKES AT

MIDTOWN LANES in New York andNOTHING BUT STRIKES AT

MID-WORLDLANES on the Calla Bryn Sturgis side. Remember?”

They all did.

“And I felt something in the lining of the bag. I told Callahan, and he said…” Eddie mulled

it over. “He said, ‘This isn’t the time to investigate it.’ Or something like that. I agreed. I remember thinking we had enough mysteries on our hands already, we’d save this one for

another day. Roland, who in God’s name put that thing in the bag, do you think?”

“For that matter, who left the bag in the vacant lot?” Susannah asked.

“Or the key?” Jake chimed in. “I found the key to the house in Dutch Hill in that same lot.

Was it the rose? Did the rose somehow…I dunno…make them?”

Roland thought about it. “Were I to guess,” he said, “I’d say that sai King left those signs

and siguls.”

“The writer,” Eddie said. He weighed the idea, then nodded slowly. He vaguely

remembered a concept from high school—the god from the machine, it was called. There

was a fancy Latin term for it as well, but that one he couldn’t remember. Had probably

been writing Mary Lou Kenopensky’s name on his desk while the other kids had been

obediently taking notes. The basic concept was that if a playwright got himself into a

corner he could send down the god, who arrived in a flower-decked bucka wagon from

overhead and rescued the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more

religious playgoers, who believed that God—not the special-effects version who came

down from some overhead platform the audience couldn’t see but the One who wert in

heaven—reallydid save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly gone out of

fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular novelists—of the sort sai King

seemed on his way to becoming—probably still used the technique, only disguising it

better. Little escape hatches. Cards that readGET OUT OF JAIL FREE orESCAPE THE

PIRATES orFREAK STORM CUTS ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION

POSTPONED . The god from the machine (who was actually the writer), patiently

working to keep the characters safe so his tale wouldn’t end with an unsatisfying line like

“And so the ka-tet was wiped out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won, rule Discordia, so

sorry, better luck next time (whatnext time, ha-ha),THE END .”

Little safety nets, like a key. Not to mention a scrimshaw turtle.

“If he wrote those things into his story,” Eddie said, “it was long after we saw him in

1977.”

“Aye,” Roland agreed.

“And I don’t think he thought them up,” Eddie said. “Not really. He’s just…I dunno, just

a…”

“A bumhug?” Susannah asked, smiling.

“No!” Jake said, sounding a little shocked. “Not that. He’s a sender. A telecaster.” He was

thinking about his father and his father’s job at the Network.

“Bingo,” Eddie said, and leveled a finger at the boy. This idea led him to another: that if

Stephen King did not remain alive long enough to write those things into his tale, the key

and the turtle would not be there when they were needed. Jake would have been eaten by

the Doorkeeper in the house on Dutch Hill…always assuming he got that far, which he probably wouldn’t have done. And if he escaped the Dutch Hill monster, he would’ve been

eaten by the Grandfathers—Callahan’s Type One vampires—in the Dixie Pig.

Susannah thought to tell them about the vision she’d had as Mia was beginning her final

journey from the Plaza-Park Hotel to the Dixie Pig. In this vision she’d been jugged in a jail cell in Oxford, Mississippi, and there had been voices coming from a TV somewhere. Chet

Huntley, Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee: newscasters chanting the names of the dead.

Some of those names, like President Kennedy and the Diem brothers, she’d known. Others,

like Christa McAuliffe, she had not. But one of the names had been Stephen King’s, she

was quite sure of it. Chet Huntley’s partner

(good night Chet good night David)

saying that Stephen King had been struck and killed by a Dodge minivan while walking

near his house. King had been fifty-two, according to Brinkley.

Had Susannah told them that, a great many things might have happened differently, or not

at all. She was opening her mouth to add it into the conversation—a falling chip on a

hillside strikes a stone which strikes a larger stone which then strikes two others and starts a landslide—when there was the clunk of an opening door and the clack of approaching

footsteps. They all turned, Jake reaching for a ’Riza, the others for their guns.

“Relax, fellas,” Susannah murmured. “It’s all right. I know this guy.” And then to DNK

45932,DOMESTIC , she said: “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. In fact, I didn’t

expect to see you at all. What’s up, Nigel old buddy?”

So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and thedeus ex machina

which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a

late-spring day in the year of ’99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted

their parts below.

Three

The nice thing about robots, in Susannah’s opinion, was that most of them didn’t hold

grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual equipment (although

he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access to the right components, discs, and

repair tutorials), so he had come back here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains

of the shattered (and completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and

introduced himself to her friends.

“Nice to meet you, Nige,” Eddie said, “but you’ll want to get started on those repairs, I

kennit, so we won’t keep you.” Eddie’s voice was pleasant and he’d reholstered his gun,

but he kept his hand on the butt. In truth he was a little bit freaked by the resemblance Nigel bore to a certain messenger robot in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. That onehad held a

grudge.

“No, stay,” Roland said. “We may have chores for you, but for the time being I’d as soon you were quiet. Turned off, if it please you.”And if it doesn’t, his tone implied.

“Certainly, sai,” Nigel replied in his plummy British accent. “You may reactivate me with

the wordsNigel, I need you. ”

“Very good,” Roland said.

Nigel folded his scrawny (but undoubtedly powerful) stainless-steel arms across his chest

and went still.

“Came back to pick up the broken glass,” Eddie marveled. “Maybe the Tet Corporation

could sell em. Every housewife in America would want two—one for the house and one for

the yard.”

“The less we’re involved with science, the better,” Susannah said darkly. In spite of her

brief nap while leaning against the door between Fedic and New York, she looked haggard,

done almost to death. “Look where it’s gotten this world.”

Roland nodded to Jake, who told of his and Pere Callahan’s adventures in the New York of

1999, beginning with the taxi that had almost hit Oy and ending with their two-man attack

on the low men and the vampires in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. He did not neglect to

tell how they had disposed of Black Thirteen by putting it in a storage locker at the World

Trade Center, where it would be safe until early June of 2002, and how they had found the

turtle, which Susannah had dropped, like a message in a bottle, in the gutter outside the

Dixie Pig.

“So brave,” Susannah said, and ruffled Jake’s hair. Then she bent to stroke Oy’s head. The

bumbler stretched his long neck to maximize the caress, his eyes half-closed and a grin on

his foxy little face. “So damned brave. Thankee-sai, Jake.”

“Thank Ake!” Oy agreed.

“If it hadn’t been for the turtle, they would have gotten us both.” Jake’s voice was steady,

but he had gone pale. “As it was, the Pere…he…” Jake wiped away a tear with the heel of

his hand and gazed at Roland. “You used his voice to send me on. I heard you.”