Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Roland’s tet can imagine that very well.

“ ‘Don’t make too much of it,’ I said. ‘As that new fellow Dinky might say, I don’t put my

business on the street. It’s really as simple as that. There’s no chivalry involved.’

“He said he was grateful nevertheless, then looked around and said, very low: ‘I’d pay you

back for your kindness, Ted, by telling you to cooperate with them, to the extent that you

can. I don’t mean you should get me in trouble, but I don’t want you to get in more trouble

yourself, either. They may not need you quite as badly as you may think.’

“And I’d have you hear me well now, lady and gentlemen, for this may be very important;

I simply don’t know. All I know for certain is that what Trampas told me next gave me a

terrible deep chill. He said that of all the other-side worlds, there’s one that’s unique. They call it the Real World. All Trampas seems to know about it is that it’s real in the same way

Mid-World was, before the Beams began to weaken and Mid-World moved on. In

America-side of this special ‘Real’ World, he says, time sometimes jerks but always runs

one way: ahead. And in that world lives a man who also serves as a kind of facilitator; he

may even be a mortal guardian of Gan’s Beam.”

Twelve

Roland looked at Eddie, and as their eyes met, both mouthed the same word:King.

Thirteen

“Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has ever

protected his life. ‘They say his song has cast the circle,’ Trampas told me, ‘although no

one seems to know exactly what that means.’ Now, however, ka—not the Red King but

plain old ka—has decreed that this man, this guardian or whatever he is, should die. He’s stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was supposed to sing, he’s stopped, and that has

finally made him vulnerable. Butnotto the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No,

it’s kahe’s vulnerable to. ‘He no longer sings,’ Trampas said. ‘His song, the one that

matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose.’ ”

Fourteen

In the outer silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it.

Fifteen

“Trampas told me all this only so I’d understand I was no longer completely indispensable.

Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor in bringing down

Shardik’s Beam before this man’s death could cause Gan’s Beam to break.”

A pause.

“Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge?

Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn’t be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple

failure of imagination? One doesn’t like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring

about the end, yet…”

Sixteen

Roland, exasperated, twirled his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were

listening could see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi

guard knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some rambling,

discursive sidetrack. It was understandable—the man was clearly exhausted—but there

was something here more important than everything else. Eddie knew it, too. Roland could

read it on the young man’s strained face. Together they watched the remaining brown

tape—now no more than an eighth of an inch deep—melt away.

Seventeen

“…yet we’re only poor benighted humies, and I suppose we can’t know about these things,

not with any degree of certainty…”

He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at last:

“I asked this magic man’s name and Trampas said, ‘I know it not, Ted, but Idoknow

there’s no magic in him anymore, for he’s ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do.

If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of

Ninety-nine, which is that of ourworld, will combine to—”

But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.

Eighteen

The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that

lowfwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressedSTOP . He muttered

“Fuck!” under his breath.

“Just when it was getting interesting,” Jake said. “And those numbers again.

Nineteen…and ninety-nine.” He paused, then said them together. “Nineteen-ninety-nine.”

Then a third time. “1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to

have her baby. Where Black Thirteen is now.”

“Keystone World, Keystone Year,” Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle,

held it up to one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. “Where time always

goes in one direction. Like it’s s’posed to.”

“Gancreated time,” Roland said. “This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the

void—some tales say from the sea, but both surely mean thePrim —and made the world.

Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling and that was time.”

Something was gathering in the cave. Some revelation. They all felt it, a thing as close to

bursting as Mia’s belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been haunted

by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the sky, saw them

written on board fences, heard them in their dreams.

Oy looked up, ears cocked, eyes bright.

Susannah said, “When Mia left the room we were in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie

Pig—room1919, it was—I fell into a kind of trance. I had

dreams…jailhouse-dreams…newscasters announcing that this one, that one, and t’other

one had died—”

“You told us,” Eddie said.

She shook her head violently. “Notall of it, I didn’t. Because some of it didn’t seem to

make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy’s littleboy was dead,

for instance—little John-John, the one who saluted his Daddy’s coffin when the catafalque

went by. I didn’t tell you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had little John-John

Kennedy died in your whens? Either of your whens?”

They shook their heads. Jake was not even sure of whom Susannah was speaking.

“But hedid . In the Keystone World, and in a when beyond any of ours. I bet it was in the

when of ’99. So dies the son of the last gunslinger, O Discordia. What I think now is that I was kind of hearing the obituary page fromThe Time Traveler’s Weekly . It was all

different times mixed together. John-John Kennedy, then Stephen King. I’d never heard of

him, but David Brinkley said he wrote’Salem’s Lot . That’s the book Father Callahan was

in, right?”

Roland and Eddie nodded.

“Father Callahan told us his story.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “But what—”

She overrode him. Her eyes were hazy, distant. Eyes just a look away from understanding.

“And then comes Brautigan to the Ka-Tet of Nineteen, and tellshis tale. And look! Look at

the tape counter!”

They leaned over. In the windows were

1999.

“I think King might have written Ted’s story, too,” she said. “Anybody want to take a

guess what yearthat story showed up, orwill show up, in the Keystone World?”

“1999,” Jake said, low. “But not the part we heard. The part wedidn’t hear. Ted’s

Connecticut Adventure.”

“And you met him,” Susannah said, looking at her dinh and her husband. “You met

Stephen King.”

They nodded again.

“He made the Pere, he made Brautigan, he madeus, ” she said, as if to herself, then shook

her head. “No. ‘All things serve the Beam.’ He…hefacilitated us.”

“Yeah.” Eddie was nodding. “Yeah, okay. That feels just about right.”

“In my dream I was in a cell,” she said. “I was wearing the clothes I had on when I got

arrested. And David Brinkley said Stephen King was dead, woe, Discordia—something

like that. Brinkley said he was…” She paused, frowning. She would have demanded that

Roland hypnotize the complete recollection out of her if it had been necessary, but it turned out not to be. “Brinkley said King was killed by a minivan while walking near his home in

Lovell, Maine.”

Eddie jerked. Roland sat forward, his eyes burning. “Do you say so?”

Susannah nodded firmly.

“He bought the house on Turtleback Lane!” the gunslinger roared. He reached out and took hold of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie seemed not to even notice. “Ofcourse he did! Ka speaks

and the wind blows! He moved a little further along the Path of the Beam and bought the

house where it’s thin! Where we saw the walk-ins! Where we talked to John Cullum and

then came back through! Do you doubt it?Do you doubt it so much as a single goddam

bit? ”

Eddie shook his head. Of course he didn’t doubt it. It had a ring, like the one you got when