Stephen King – The Dark Tower

exploded out of him in a rough whoosh. Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He

gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.

Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head:Hile,

Roland! Hile, gunslinger!

How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind

it, faint butthere, the sound of bestial, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.

Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the

gunslinger’s left hand, thinking:He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it—

“—and may you climb to the top,” Eddie breathed.

They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked—askew but otherwise peacefully

enough—at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day,

but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at

all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there couldbe such things, that people walked

past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the

greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them—

Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles

were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it

and forced it down.

“Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone.” A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded.

Roland was right, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s

eyes were shiny with tears.“He’s gone, too. The Pere.”

“The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did…Did they…?” Eddie couldn’t finish the

thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one ofthem was too awful to speak aloud.

“No, Eddie. Not at all. He—” Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides

gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking

at Eddie as he did it.

“He escaped them,” Eddie said.

“Aye, and how angry they must be.”

Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No,sobbing .

“Good,” he said. “Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself with

it.” And as Roland did: “What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another

Beamquake?”

“I think it was a bit of both,” Roland said. “There’s a thing calledaven kal, which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it.”

“And allowed to see what we wanted to see.”

Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. “We

saw what theBeam wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go.”

“Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach

classes in…I don’t know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends o’ the Rainbow?”

Roland was smiling. “Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and

Summa Logicales.”

“Logicka-what?”

Roland didn’t answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get

his breath back—both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not

here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant

lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had

first believed, but thepotential of sai King…of what sai King might be able to create, given

world enough and time. Wasn’t King also being carried onaven kal, perhaps generating the

very wave that lifted him?

A man can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries,Cort had

lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort

speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as

his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort

had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a mancould pull himself up by them.

Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of

stories, was King not a creator? And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something

from nothing—seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own

bootstraps?

And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long philosophical thoughts while two

members of his tet were lost?

“Get this carriage going,” Roland said, trying to ignore the sweet humming he could

hear—whether the Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know.

“We’ve got to get to Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our

way through to where Susannah is.”

And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie

Pig, he would also head to where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.

Eddie reached for the transmission lever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie

had never quit running—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at

Roland with a bleak eye.

“What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is, spill it quick. The baby’s coming now—may have

come already. Soon they’ll have no more use for her!”

“I know,” Eddie said. “But we can’t go to Lovell.” He grimaced as if what he was saying

was causing him physical pain. Roland guessed it probably was. “Not yet.”

Two

They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweetly tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that

sometimes became joyous voices. They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees,

where a million faces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you

say lost.

Eddie half-expected Roland to shout at him—it wouldn’t be the first time—or maybe clout

him upside the head, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when his

pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to the jaw might

clear his head, by Shardik.

Only muddy thinking’s not the trouble and you know it,he thought.Your head is clearer

than his. If it wasn’t, you could let go of this world and go on hunting for your lost wife.

At last Roland spoke. “What is it, then? This?” He bent and picked up the folded piece of

paper with Aaron Deepneau’s pinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment,

then flicked it into Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.

“You know how much I love her,” Eddie said in a low, strained voice. “Youknow that.”

Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared to be staring down at his own

broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast

eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of

Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for

mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.

“I’d go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, thissecond! But wehave to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave

today, July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We—”

“Eddie, we’ve been through all of this.” Still not looking at him.

“Yes, but do youunderstand it? Only one bullet to shoot, one ’Riza to throw. That’s why

we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as

soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him.

And I was right, wasn’t I?” Almost pleading now.“Wasn’t I?”

Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was glad. This was hard enough,wretched enough,

without having to bear the turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.

“And it may not matter if we stay a little longer. If we concentrate on those two women

lying together on those two beds, Roland—if we concentrate on Suze and Miaas we last

saw them —then it’s possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn’t it?”

After a long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn’t conscious of drawing a

single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they

found what the gunslinger had come to think of as an “old-ones door,” because such doors

werededicated, and always came out at the same place. But were they to find amagic door

somewhere along Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behind when thePrim