Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a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.