Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). “Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who reallydid invent the Internet!” She looked up (Chip’s thumb now

nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and

gave Chip a roguish little smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two

register. “I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!”

Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white paper. He was glad to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from

Viking Motors (“The Boys with the Toys”) in Oxford himself.

“I know what you mean! That fella Gore, too slick!” Mrs. Tassenbaum was nodding

enthusiastically, and so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. “His

hair, for instance—how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his—”

That was when the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A

goddamned lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell “Chip”

McAvoy knew the man who’d caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through the

door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn’t he always known, deep in his

heart’s most secret place, that the man with the terrible blue eyes hadn’t finished his

business and would be back?

Back for him?

That idea broke his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along

the inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store—the place was

bigger and fancier than it had been in ’77, thank God for his father’s insistence on

extravagant insurance coverage—and Mrs. Tassenbaum uttered a piercing scream. Three

or four people who had been browsing the aisles turned with expressions of astonishment,

and one of them hit the floor in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda

Beemer, eldest daughter of one of the two women who’d been killed in here on That Day.

Then it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He heard a bullet buzz over

his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop, hands raised.

“Don’t shoot, mister!” he heard himself bawl in the thin, wavering voice of an old man.

“Take whatever’s in the register but don’t shoot me!”

“Turn around,” said the voice of the man who had turned Chip’s world turtle on That Day,

the man who’d almost gotten him killed (he’d been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two

weeks, by the living Jesus) and had now reappeared like an old monster from some child’s

closet. “The rest of you on the floor, but you turn around, shopkeeper. Turn around and see

me.

“See me very well.”

Three

The man swayed from side to side, and for a moment Roland thought he would faint

instead of turning. Perhaps some survival-oriented part of his brain suggested that fainting

was more likely to get him killed, for the shopkeeper managed to keep his feet anddid

finally turn and face the gunslinger. His dress was eerily similar to what he’d been wearing

the last time Roland was here; it could have been the same black tie and butcher’s apron,

tied up high on his midriff. His hair was still slicked back along his skull, but now it was

wholly white instead of salt-and-pepper. Roland remembered the way blood had dashed

back from the left side of the shopkeeper’s temple as a bullet—one fired by Andolini

himself, for all the gunslinger knew—grooved him. Now there was a grayish knot of

scar-tissue there. Roland guessed the man combed his hair in a way that would display that

mark rather than hide it. He’d either had a fool’s luck that day or been saved by ka. Roland

thought ka the more likely.

Judging from the sick look of recognition in the shopkeeper’s eyes, he thought so, too.

“Do you have a cartomobile, a truckomobile, or a tack-see?” Roland asked, holding the

barrel of his gun on the shopkeeper’s middle.

Jake stepped up beside Roland. “What are you driving?” he asked the shopkeeper. “That’s

what he means.”

“Truck!” the shopkeeper managed. “International Harvester pickup! It’s outside in the

lot!” He reached under his apron so suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting

him. The shopkeeper—mercifully—didn’t seem to notice. All of the store’s customers

were now lying prone, including the woman who’d been at the counter. Roland could smell

the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach rumbled. He was tired,

hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many things to think about, too many by

far. His mind couldn’t keep up. Jake would have said he needed to “take a time-out,” but he

didn’t see any time-outs in their immediate future.

The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His fingers were trembling, and the keys

jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting in the windows struck them and bounced

complicated reflections into the gunslinger’s eyes. First the man in the white apron had

plunged a hand out of sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding

up a bunch of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he weretrying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too, hadn’t it? The

storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that widower’s hump in his back) had

followed him and Eddie from place to place like a cat who won’t stop getting under your

feet, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying all around them (just as he’d seemed

oblivious of the one that grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered,

he had talked about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while

he waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often safe from

harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out of the world.

“Take the truck, take it and go!” the shopkeeper was telling him. “It’s yours! I’m giving it

to you! Really!”

“If you don’t stop flashing those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I’ll take is your

breath,” Roland said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed

that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of four, which meant they’d been America-side

for nine minutes already. Time was racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was

almost certainly on his afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn’t know it.

Or had it happened already? They—Roland, anyway—had always assumed that the

writer’s death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the

impact of his death would be more gradual.

“How far from here to Turtleback Lane?” Roland rapped at the storekeeper.

The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror. Never in his life had Roland

felt more like shooting a man…or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a

goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.

Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke. She was looking up at Roland

and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. “That’s in Lovell, mister. It’s about five miles from here.”

One look in her eyes—large and brown, fearful but not panicky—and Roland decided this

was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was—

He turned to Jake. “Can you drive the shopkeeper’s truck five miles?”

Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn’t afford to risk ultimate

failure by trying to do a thing he—city boy that he was—had never done in his life.

“No,” Jake said. “I don’t think so. What about you?”

Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum’s car. It didn’t look that hard…but there

was his hip to consider. Rosa had told him that dry twist moved fast—like a fire driven by

strong winds, she’d said—and now he knew what she’d meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn

Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if

the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The

pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He’d watched how Eddie

manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up