Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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