Stephen King – The Dark Tower

friend. Tonight the world seemed made of death.

He himself had died and come back: back to Mid-World and back to Roland. All afternoon

he had tried to believe the same thing might happen to Eddie and knew somehow that it

would not. Jake’s part in the tale had not been finished. Eddie’s was. Jake would have

given twenty years of his life—thirty!—not to believe that, but he did. He supposed he had

progged it somehow.

The rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

Jake knew a spider. Was Mia’s child watching all of this? Having fun? Maybe rooting for

one side or the other, like a fucking Yankee fan in the bleachers?

He is. I know he is. I feel him.

“Are you all right, kiddo?” Dinky asked.

“No,” Jake said. “Not all right.” And Dinky nodded as if that was a perfectly reasonable

answer.Well, Jake thought,probably he expected it. He’s a telepath, after all .

As if to underline this, Dinky had asked who Mordred was.

“You don’t want to know,” Jake said. “Believe me.” He snuffed his cigarette half-smoked

(“All your lung cancer’s right here, in the last quarter-inch,” his father used to say in tones of absolute certainty, pointing to one of his own filterless cigarettes like a TV pitchman)

and left Corbett Hall. He used the back door, hoping to avoid the cluster of waiting,

anxious Breakers, and in that he had succeeded. Now he was in Pleasantville, sitting on the

curb like one of the homeless people you saw back in New York, waiting to be called.

Waiting for the end.

He thought about going into the tavern, maybe to draw himself a beer (surely if he was old

enough to smoke and to kill people from ambush he was old enough to drink a beer),

maybe just to see if the jukebox would play without change. He bet that Algul Siento had

been what his Dad had claimed America would become in time, a cashless society, and that

old Seeberg was rigged so you only had to push the buttons in order to start the music. And

he bet that if he looked at the song-strip next to 19, he’d see “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” by Elton John.

He got to his feet, and that was when the call came. Nor was he the only one who heard it;

Oy let go a short, hurt-sounding yip. Roland might have been standing right next to them.

To me, Jake, and hurry. He’s going.

Seven

Jake hurried back down one of the alleys, skirted the still-smoldering Warden’s House

(Tassa the houseboy, who had either ignored Roland’s order to leave or hadn’t been

informed of it, was sitting silently on the stoop in a kilt and a sweatshirt, his head in his hands), and began to trot up the Mall, sparing a quick and troubled glance at the long line of dead bodies. The little séance-circle he’d seen earlier was gone.

I won’t cry,he promised himself grimly.If I’m old enough to smoke and think about

drawing myself a beer, I’m old enough to control my stupid eyes. I won’t cry.

Knowing he almost certainly would.

Eight

Sheemie and Ted had joined Dinky outside the proctor’s suite. Dinky had given up his seat

to Sheemie. Ted looked tired, but Sheemie looked like shit on a cracker to Jake: eyes

bloodshot again, a crust of dried blood around his nose and one ear, cheeks leaden. He had

taken off one of his slippers and was massaging his foot as though it pained him. Yet he

was clearly happy. Maybe even exalted.

“Beam says all may yet be well, young Jake,” Sheemie said. “Beam says not too late.

Beam says thankya.”

“That’s good,” Jake said, reaching for the doorknob. He barely heard what Sheemie was

saying. He was concentrating

(won’t cry and make it harder for her)

on controlling his emotions once he was inside. Then Sheemie said something that brought

him back in a hurry.

“Not too late in the Real World, either,” Sheemie said. “We know. We peeked. Saw the

moving sign. Didn’t we, Ted?”

“Indeed we did.” Ted was holding a can of Nozz-A-La in his lap. Now he raised it and

took a sip. “When you get in there, Jake, tell Roland that if it’s June 19th of ’99 you’re

interested in, you’re still okay. But the margin’s commencing to get a little thin.”

“I’ll tell him,” Jake said.

“And remind him that time sometimes slips over there. Slips like an old transmission.

That’s apt to continue for quite awhile, regardless of the Beam’s recovery. And once the

19th is gone…”

“It can never come again,” Jake said. “Not there. We know.” He opened the door and

slipped into the darkness of the proctor’s suite.

Nine

A single circle of stringent yellow light, thrown by the lamp on the bedtable, lay upon

Eddie Dean’s face. It cast the shadow of his nose on his left cheek and turned his closed

eyes into dark sockets. Susannah was kneeling on the floor beside him, holding both of his

hands in both of hers and looking down at him. Her shadow ran long upon the wall. Roland

sat on the other side of the bed, in deep shadow. The dying man’s long, muttered

monologue had ceased, and his respiration had lost all semblance of regularity. He would

snatch a deep breath, hold it, then let it out in a lengthy, whistling whoosh. His chest would lie still so long that Susannah would look up into his face, her eyes shining with anxiety

until the next long, tearing breath had begun.

Jake sat down on the bed next to Roland, looked at Eddie, looked at Susannah, then looked

hesitantly into the gunslinger’s face. In the gloom he could see nothing there except

weariness.

“Ted says to tell you it’s almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya. Also that

time could slip a notch.”

Roland nodded. “Yet we’ll wait for this to be finished, I think. It won’t be much longer,

and we owe him that.”

“How much longer?” Jake murmured.

“I don’t know. I thought he might be gone before you got here, even if you ran—”

“I did, once I got to the grassy part—”

“—but, as you see…”

“He fights hard,” Susannah said, and that this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. “My man fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say.”

Ten

And so he did. Five endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie’s eyes opened. “Sue…” He said, “Su…sie—”

She leaned close, still holding his hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration

fiercely narrowed. And with an effort Jake wouldn’t have believed possible, Eddie freed

one of his hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed no sign. The smile that

bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps even sensuous.

“Eddie! Welcome back!”

“Don’t bullshit…a bullshitter,” he whispered. “I’m goin, sweetheart, not comin.”

“That’s just plain sil—”

“Hush,” he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her

face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. “I…will…wait for you,” he

said, forcing each word out with immense effort.

Jake saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body’s last message to the living

world, and that was when the boy’s heart finally understood what his head had known for

hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and scoured. When Roland took his

hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to

Eddie, it could happen to anybody. It could happen to him.

“Yes, Eddie. I know you’ll wait,” she said.

“In…” He pulled in another of those great, wretched, rasping breaths. His eyes were as

brilliant as gemstones. “In the clearing.” Another breath. Hand holding her hair. Lamplight

casting them both in its mystic yellow circle. “The one at the end of the path.”

“Yes, dear.” Her voice was calm now, but a tear fell on Eddie’s cheek and ran slowly

down to the line of jaw. “I hear you very well. Wait for me and I’ll find you and we’ll go

together. I’ll be walking then, on my own legs.”

Eddie smiled at her, then turned his eyes to Jake.

“Jake…to me.”

No,Jake thought, panicked,no, I can’t, I can’t .

But he was already leaning close, into that smell of the end. He could see the fine line of

grit just below Eddie’s hairline turning to paste as more tiny droplets of sweat sprang up.

“Wait for me, too,” Jake said through numb lips. “Okay, Eddie? We’ll all go on together.

We’ll be ka-tet, just like we were.” He tried to smile and couldn’t. His heart hurt too much for smiling. He wondered if it might not explode in his chest, the way stones sometimes