found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had all the talent they needed to
finish the job). One thing thatdid seem clear was Brautigan’s talent as a facilitator, a
psychic who was not just powerful by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just
by being near them. Finli’s thoughts, ordinarily unreadable even to Breakers, now burned
in Pimli’s mind like neon.
Finli: (He is extraordinary)
Pimli: (And, so far as we know, unique Have you seen the thing)
Image: Eyes growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.
Finli: (Yes Do you know what causes it)
Pimli: (Not at all Nor care dear Finli nor care That old)
Image: An elderly mongrel with burdocks in his matted fur, limping along on three legs.
(has almost finished his work almost time to)
Image: A gun, one of the hume guards’ Berettas, against the side of the old mongrel’s
head.
Three stories below them, the subject of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the
newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a
leather-upholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to swallow him, and
appeared to read.
Pimli felt the psychic force rising past them and through them, to the skylight and through
that, too, rising to the Beam that ran directly above Algul, working against it, chipping and eroding and rubbing relentlessly against the grain. Eating holes in the magic. Working
patiently to put out the eyes of the Bear. To crack the shell of the Turtle. To break the Beam which ran from Shardik to Maturin. To topple the Dark Tower which stood between.
Pimli turned to his companion and wasn’t surprised to realize he could now see the
cunning little teeth in the Tego’s weasel head. Smiling at last! Nor was he surprised to
realize he could read the black eyes. Taheen, under ordinary circumstances, could send and
receive some very simple mental communications, but not be progged. Here, though, all that changed. Here—
—Here Finli o’ Tego was at peace. His concerns
(hinky-di-di)
were gone. At least for the time being.
Pimli sent Finli a series of bright images: a champagne bottle breaking over the stern of a
boat; hundreds of flat black graduation caps rising in the air; a flag being planted on Mount Everest; a laughing couple escaping a church with their heads bent against a pelting storm
of rice; a planet—Earth—suddenly glowing with fierce brilliance.
Images that all said the same thing.
“Yes,” Finli said, and Pimli wondered how he could ever have thought those eyes hard to
read. “Yes, indeed. Success at the end of the day.”
Neither of them looked down at that moment. Had they done, they would have seen Ted
Brautigan—an old dog, yes, and tired, but perhaps notquite as tired as some
thought—looking up at them.
With a ghost of his own smile.
Nine
There was never rain out here, at least not during Pimli’s years, but sometimes, in the
Stygian blackness of its nights, there were great volleys of dry thunder. Most of the
Devar-Toi’s staff had trained themselves to sleep through these fusillades, but Pimli often
woke up, heart hammering in his throat, the Our Father running through his mostly
unconscious mind like a circle of spinning red ribbon.
Earlier that day, talking to Finli, the Master of Algul Siento had used the phrasehinky-di-di with a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child’s phrase, almost,
likeallee-allee-in-free oreenie-meenie-minie-moe .
Now, lying in his bed at Shapleigh House (known as Shit House to the Breakers), a full
Mall’s length away from Damli House, Pimli remembered the feeling—the
flat-outcertainty —that everything was going to be okay; success assured, only a matter of
time. On the balcony Finli had shared it, but Pimli wondered if his Security Chief was now
lying awake as Pimli himself was, and thinking how easy it was to be misled when you
were around working Breakers. Because, do ya, they sent up that happy-gas. That
good-mind vibe.
And suppose…justsuppose, now…someone was actuallychanneling that feeling? Sending
it up to them like a lullabye?Go to sleep, Pimli, go to sleep, Finli, go to sleep all of you
good children…
Ridiculous idea, totally paranoid. Still, when another double-boom of thunder rolled out of
what might still be the southeast—from the direction of Fedic and the Discordia,
anyway—Pimli Prentiss sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.
Finli had spoken of doubling the guard tonight, both in the watchtowers and along the
fences. Perhaps tomorrow they might triple it. Just to be on the safe side. And because
complacency this close to the end would be a very bad thing, indeed.
Pimli got out of bed, a tall man with a hairy slab of gut, now wearing blue pajama pants
and nothing else. He pissed, then knelt in front of the toilet’s lowered lid, folded his hands, and prayed until he felt sleepy. He prayed to do his duty. He prayed to see trouble before
trouble saw him. He prayed for his Ma, just as Jim Jones had prayed for his as he watched
the line move toward the tub of poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to
little more than a senile mutter, then went back to bed, calm again. His last thought before
drifting off was about tripling the guard first thing in the morning, and that was the first
thing he thought of when he woke to a room awash in artificial sunlight. Because you had
to take care of the eggs when you were almost home.
Chapter VII:
Ka-Shume
One
A feeling both blue and strange crept among the gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged
to him or her alone. Roland, who might have been expected to know the feeling for what it
was (ka-shume, Cort would have called it), ascribed it instead to worries about the
following day and even more to the debilitating atmosphere of Thunderclap, where day
was dim and night was as dark as blindness.
Certainly there was enough to keep them busy after the departure of Brautigan, Earnshaw,
and Sheemie Ruiz, that friend of Roland’s childhood. (Both Susannah and Eddie had
attempted to talk to the gunslinger about Sheemie, and Roland had shaken them off. Jake,
strong in the touch, hadn’t even tried. Roland wasn’t ready to talk about those old days
again, at least not yet.) There was a path leading down and around the flank of Steek-Tete,
and they found the cave of which the old man had told them behind a cunning camouflage
of rocks and desert-dusty bushes. This cave was much bigger than the one above, with gas
lanterns hung from spikes that had been driven into the rock walls. Jake and Eddie lit two
of these on each side, and the four of them examined the cave’s contents in silence.
The first thing Roland noticed was the sleeping-bags: a quartet lined up against the
left-hand wall, each considerately placed on an inflated air mattress. The tags on the bags
readPROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY . Beside the last of these, a fifth air mattress had been
covered with a layer of bath towels.They were expecting four people and one animal, the
gunslinger thought.Precognition, or have they been watching us somehow? And does it
matter?
There was a plastic-swaddled object sitting on a barrel markedDANGER! MUNITIONS!
Eddie removed the protective plastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of the
reels was loaded. Roland could make nothing of the single word on the front of the
speaking machine and asked Susannah what it was.
“Wollensak,” she said. “A German company. When it comes to these things, they make
the best.”
“Not no mo’, sugarbee,” Eddie said. “In my when we like to say ‘Sony! No baloney!’They
make a tape-player you can clip right to your belt. It’s called a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighs twenty pounds. More, with the batteries.”
Susannah was examining the unmarked tape boxes that had been stacked beside the
Wollensak. There were three of them. “I can’t wait to hear what’s on these,” she said.
“After the daylight goes, maybe,” Roland said. “For now, let’s see what else we’ve got
here.”
“Roland?” Jake asked.
The gunslinger turned toward him. There was something about the boy’s face that almost
always softened Roland’s own. Looking at Jake did not make the gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give his features a quality they didn’t ordinarily have. Susannah thought it was
the look of love. And, perhaps, some thin hope for the future.
“What is it, Jake?”
“I know we’re going to fight—”
“ ‘Join us next week forReturn to the O.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee Van
Cleef,’ ” Eddie murmured, walking toward the back of the cave. There a much larger object
had been covered with what looked like a quilted mover’s pad.