Then the tree-lined country road was gone. Bridgton was gone. The world was gone.
There was the sound of todash chimes, repulsive and nauseating, making him want to grit
his teeth in protest…except his teeth were gone, too.
Three
Like Eddie, Roland had a clear sense of being firstlifted and thenhung, like something that
had lost its ties to Earth’s gravity. He heard the chimes and felt himself elevated through
the wall of existence, but he understood this wasn’t real todash—at least not of the sort
they’d experienced before. This was very likely what Vannay calledaven kal, words which
meantlifted on the wind orcarried on the wave . Only thekal form, instead of the more
usualkas, indicated a natural force of disastrous proportions: not a wind but a hurricane; not a wave but atsunami .
The very Beam means to speak to you, Gabby,Vannay said in his mind—Gabby, the old
sarcastic nickname Vannay had adopted because Steven Deschain’s boy was so
close-mouthed. His limping, brilliant tutor had stopped using it (probably at Cort’s
insistence) the year Roland had turned eleven.You would do well to listen if it does.
I will listen very well,Roland replied, and was dropped. He gagged, weightless and
nauseated.
More chimes. Then, suddenly, he was floating again, this time above a room filled with
empty beds. One look was enough to assure him that this was where the Wolves brought
the children they kidnapped from the Borderland Callas. At the far end of the room—
A hand grasped his arm, a thing Roland would have thought impossible in this state. He
looked to his left and saw Eddie beside him, floating naked. They were both naked, their
clothes left behind in the writer’s world.
Roland had already seen what Eddie was pointing to. At the far end of the room, a pair of
beds had been pushed together. A white woman lay on one of them. Her legs—the very
ones Susannah had used on their todash visit to New York, Roland had no doubt—were
spread wide. A woman with the head of a rat—one of the taheen, he felt sure—bent
between them.
Next to the white woman was a dark-skinned one whose legs ended just below the knees.
Floating naked or not, nauseated or not, todash or not, Roland had never in his life been so
glad to see anyone. And Eddie felt the same. Roland heard him cry out joyfully in the
center of his head and reached a hand to still the younger man. Hehad to still him, for
Susannah was looking at them, had almost certainly seen them, and if she spoke to them, he
needed to hear every word she said. Because although those words would come from her
mouth, it would very likely be the Beam that spoke; the Voice of the Bear or that of the
Turtle.
Both women wore metal hoods over their hair. A length of segmented steel hose
connected them.
Some kind of Vulcan mind-meld,Eddie said, once again filling the center of his head and
blotting out everything else.Or maybe —
Hush!Roland broke in.Hush, Eddie, for your father’s sake!
A man wearing a white coat seized a pair of cruel-looking forceps from a tray and pushed
the rathead taheen nurse aside. He bent, peering up between Mia’s legs and holding the
forceps above his head. Standing close by, wearing a tee-shirt with words of Eddie and
Susannah’s world on it, was a taheen with the head of a fierce brown bird.
He’ll sense us,Roland thought.If we stay long enough, he’ll surely sense us and raise the
alarm.
But Susannah was looking at him, the eyes below the clamp of the hood feverish. Bright
with understanding.Seeing them, aye, say true.
She spoke a single word, and in a moment of inexplicable but perfectly reliable intuition,
Roland understood the word came not from Susannah but from Mia. Yet it was also the
Voice of the Beam, a force perhaps sentient enough to understand how seriously it was
threatened, and to want to protect itself.
Chassitwas the word Susannah spoke; he heard it in his head because they were ka-tet and
an-tet; he also saw it form soundlessly on her lips as she looked up toward the place where
they floated, onlookers at something that was happening in some other where and when at
this very moment.
The hawk-headed taheen looked up, perhaps following her gaze, perhaps hearing the
chimes with its preternaturally sharp ears. Then the doctor lowered his forceps and thrust
them beneath Mia’s gown. She shrieked. Susannah shrieked with her. And as if Roland’s
essentially bodiless being could be pushed away by the force of those combined screams
like a milkweed pod lifted and carried on a gust of October wind, the gunslinger felt
himself rise violently, losing touch with this place as he went, but holding onto that one
word. It brought with it a brilliant memory of his mother leaning over him as he lay in bed.
In the room of many colors, this had been, the nursery, and of course now he understood
the colors he’d only accepted as a young boy, accepted as children barely out of their clouts accept everything: with unquestioning wonder, with the unspoken assumption that it’sall
magic.
The windows of the nursery had been stained glass representing the Bends o’ the Rainbow,
of course. He remembered his mother leaning toward him, her face pied with that lovely
various light, her hood thrown back so he could trace the curve of her neck with the eye of
a child
(it’sallmagic )
and the soul of a lover; he remembered thinking how he would court her and win her from
his father, if she would have him; how they would marry and have children of their own
and live forever in that fairy-tale kingdom called the All-A-Glow; and how she sang to him,
how Gabrielle Deschain sang to her little boy with his big eyes looking solemnly up at her
from his pillow and his face already stamped with the many swimming colors of his
wandering life, singing a lilting nonsense song that went like this:
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!
Enough to fill my basket,he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the
terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren’t quite nonsense but old numbers,
she’d told him once when he had asked.Chussit, chissit, chassit : seventeen, eighteen,
nineteen.
Chassit is nineteen,he thought.Of course, it’s all nineteen . Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy
standing at Jake’s left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his
teeth.
Chussit, chissit, chassit,Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig.Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my
basket. But what basket? What does it mean?
Four
Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum’s twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six
thousand on the odometer and she was just getting wa’amed up, Cullum liked to tell people)
seesawed lazily back and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not only
unconscious buttransparent rolled lazily with the car’s motion like corpses in a sunken boat.
And around them floated the debris which collects in any old car that’s been hard-used: the
ashes and pens and paperclips and the world’s oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat
and pine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of
the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door.
Someone passing would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this
stuff—and people! people whomight be dead! —floating around in the car like jetsam in a
space capsule. But no onedid come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lake were
mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even though there was
really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke was almost gone.
Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his
neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out
behind him. Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways
motion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line
of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule bubbles,
beside one blood-crusted cheek.
Five
Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as well. That was why
she’d labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of