Stephen King – The Dark Tower

and the one that made it slow down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of

the right hip was always rolling in its socket.

He didn’t think he could do that. Not with any degree of safety.

“I think not,” he said. He took the keys from the shopkeeper, then looked at the woman

lying in front of the meat-counter. “Stand up, sai,” he said.

Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on her feet, Roland gave her the

keys.I keep meeting useful people in here, he thought.If this one’s as good as Cullum

turned out to be, we might still be all right .

“You’re going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell,” Roland said.

“To Turtleback Lane,” she said.

“You say true, I say thankya.”

“Are you going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?”

“Not unless you dawdle,” Roland said.

She considered this, then nodded. “Then I won’t. Let’s go.”

“Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum,” the shopkeeper told her faintly as she started for the door.

“If I don’t come back,” she said, “you just remember one thing: it was my husband who

invented the Internet—him and his friends, partly at CalTech and partly in their own

garages.Not Albert Gore.”

Roland’s stomach rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed

away from him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman’s

pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth. The rest he handed to Jake, who ate

two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the meat with great interest.

“I’ll give you your share when we get in the truck,” Jake promised.

“Ruck,” Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis: “Share!”

“Holy jumping Jesus Christ,” the shopkeeper said.

Four

The Yankee shopkeeper’s accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn’t. It was a

standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn’t driven a standard

since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had

never driven one of those.

Jake was sitting beside her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing

turkey) on his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain in

his leg. Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition. The I-H lurched

forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the

mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a

colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass

windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake’s lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey

along with a word he had learned from Eddie.

Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. “Did that creature just sayfuck, young

man?”

“Never mind what he said,” Jake replied. His voice was shaking. The hands of the Boar’s

Head clock in the window now stood at five to four. Like Roland, the boy had never had a

sense of time as a thing so little in their control. “Use the clutch and get usout of here.”

Luckily, the shifting pattern had been embossed on the head of the stick shift and was still

faintly visible. Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch with a sneakered foot, ground the

gears hellishly, and finally found Reverse. The truck backed out onto Route 7 in a series of

jerks, then stalled halfway across the white line. She turned the ignition key, realizing she’d once more forgotten the clutch just a little too late to prevent another series of those spastic leaps. Roland and Jake were now bracing their hands against the dusty metal dashboard,

where a faded sticker proclaimedAMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE ! in red white and

blue. This series of jerks was actually a good thing, for at that moment a truck loaded with

logs—it was impossible for Roland not to think of the one that had crashed the last time

they’d been here—crested the rise to the north of the store. Had the pickup not jerked its

way back into the General Store’s parking lot (bashing the fender of a parked car as it came

to a stop), they would have been centerpunched. And very likely killed. The logging truck

swerved, horn blaring, rear wheels spuming up dust.

The creature in the boy’s lap—it looked to Mrs. Tassenbaum like some weird mixture of

dog and raccoon—barked again.

Fuck. She was almost sure of it.

The storekeeper and the other patrons were lined up on the other side of the glass, and she suddenly knew what a fish in an aquarium must feel like.

“Lady, can you drive this thing or not?” the boy yelled. He had some sort of bag over his

shoulder. It reminded her of a newsboy’s bag, only it was leather instead of canvas and

there appeared to be plates inside.

“I can drive it, young man, don’t you worry.” She was terrified, and yet at the same

time…was sheenjoying this? She almost thought she was. For the last eighteen years she’d

been little more than the great David Tassenbaum’s ornament, a supporting character in his

increasingly famous life, the lady who said “Try one ofthese ” as she passed aroundhors

d’oeuvres at parties. Now, suddenly, she was at the center of something, and she had an

idea it was something very important indeed.

“Take a deep breath,” said the man with the hard sunburned face. His brilliant blue eyes

fastened upon hers, and when they did it was hard to think of anything else. Also, the

sensation was pleasant.If this is hypnosis, she thought,they ought to teach it in the public

schools . “Hold it, then let it out. And thendrive us, for your father’s sake.”

She pulled in a deep breath as instructed, and suddenly the day seemed brighter—nearly

brilliant. And she could hear faint singing voices. Lovely voices. Was the truck’s radio on,

tuned to some opera program? No time to check. But it was nice, whatever it was. As

calming as the deep breath.

Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch and re-started the engine. This time she found

Reverse on the first try and backed into the road almost smoothly. Her first effort at a

forward gear netted her Second instead of First and the truck almost stalled when she eased

the clutch out, but then the engine seemed to take pity on her. With a wheeze of loose

pistons and a manic rapping from beneath the hood, they began rolling north toward the

Stoneham-Lovell line.

“Do you know where Turtleback Lane is?” Roland asked her. Ahead of them, near a sign

markedMILLION DOLLAR CAMPGROUND , a battered blue minivan swung out onto

the road.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re sure?” The last thing the gunslinger wanted was to waste precious time casting

about for the back road where King lived.

“Yes. We have friends who live there. The Beckhardts.”

For a moment Roland could only grope, knowing he’d heard the name but not where. Then

he got it. Beckhardt was the name of the man who owned the cabin where he and Eddie had

had their final palaver with John Cullum. He felt a fresh stab of grief in his heart at the

thought of Eddie as he’d been on that thundery afternoon, still so strong and vital.

“All right,” he said. “I believe you.”

She glanced at him across the boy sitting between. “You’re in one hell of a hurry,

mister—like the white rabbit inAlice in Wonderland . What very important date are you

almost too late for?”

Roland shook his head. “Never mind, just drive.” He looked at the clock on the dashboard,

but it didn’t work, had stopped in the long-ago with the hands pointed at (of course) 9:19.

“It may not be too late yet,” he said, while ahead of them, unheeded, the blue van began to

pull away. It strayed across the white line of Route 7 into the southbound lane and Mrs.

Tassenbaum almost committed abon mot —something about people who started drinking

before five—but then the blue van pulled back into the northbound lane, breasted the next

hill, and was gone toward the town of Lovell.

Mrs. Tassenbaum forgot about it. She had more interesting things to think about. For

instance—

“You don’t have to answer what I’m going to ask now if you don’t want to,” she said, “but

I admit that I’m curious: are you boys walk-ins?”

Five

Bryan Smith has spent the last couple of nights—along with his rottweilers, litter-twins he

has named Bullet and Pistol—in the Million Dollar Campground, just over the

Lovell-Stoneham line. It’s nice there by the river (the locals call the rickety wooden

structure spanning the water Million Dollar Bridge, which Bryan understands is a joke, and