Stephen King – The Dark Tower

house, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the

passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn the mower off.

He also removed his hat—without being exactly aware that he was doing it, Roland

thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at Roland’s hip, and widened enough to

make the crow’s-feet around them disappear.

“Howdy, mister,” he said cautiously.He thinks I’m a walk-in, Roland thought.Just as she

did.

And theywere walk-ins of a sort, he and Jake; they just happened to have come to a time

and place where such things were common.

And where time was racing.

Roland spoke before the man could go on. “Where are they? Where ishe ? Stephen King?

Speak, man, and tell me the truth!”

The hat slipped from the old man’s relaxing fingers and fell beside his feet on the newly

cut grass. His hazel eyes stared into Roland’s, fascinated: the bird looking at the snake.

“Fambly’s across the lake, at that place they gut on t’other side,” he said. “T’old Schindler place. Havin some kind of pa’ty, they are. Steve said he’d drive over after his walk.” And

he gestured to a small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just visible

around the side of the house.

“Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell this lady!”

The old man looked briefly over Roland’s shoulder, then back to the gunslinger. “Be

easier was I t’drive ya there m’self.”

Roland considered this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the

other end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they’d found the woman in

ka’s road. However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on

the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn’t he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met

in that same roadside store some three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to

play in their story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but.

All of this crossed his consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch,Eddie would have called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.

“No,” he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Tell her.Now .”

Ten

The boy—Jake—had fallen back against the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides.

The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into the kid’s face, but the kid didn’t see him.

His eyes were closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he’d fainted.

“Son?…Jake?”

“I have him,” the boy said without opening his eyes. “Not Stephen King—I can’t touch

him—but the other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?”

Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husband enough at work—holding long, muttered

dialogues with himself—to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she

had no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn’t Stephen King. Which left

about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking.

Nevertheless, shedid answer, because she knew what always slowedher down.

“Too bad he doesn’t need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

Eleven

Strawberries aren’t out in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries.

Justine Anderson (of Maybrook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are

walking along the side of Route 7 (which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg Road) with

their plastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at least half a mile along the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a hundred years ago, and it is to Garrett’s

great-grandson that Roland Deschain of Gilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a

wheel, do ya not kennit.

The two women have enjoyed their hour’s walk, not because either of them has any great

love of raspberries (Justine reckons she won’t even eat hers; the seeds get caught in her

teeth) but because it’s given them a chance to catch up on their respective families and to

laugh a little together about the years when their friendship was new and probably the most

important thing in either girl’s life. They met at Vassar College (a thousand years ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together at graduation the year they were juniors.

This is what they are talking about when the blue minivan—it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan,

Justine recognizes the make and model because her oldest son had one just like it when his

tribe started growing—comes around the curve by Melder’s German Restaurant and

Brathaus. It’s all over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming up dust from the southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar and spuming up more from the

northbound one. The second time it does this—rolling towardthemnow, and coming at a

pretty damned good clip—Justine thinks it may actually go into the ditch and turn over

(“turn turtle,” they used to say back in the forties, when she and Elvira had been at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back on the road just before that can happen.

“Look out, that person’s drunk or something!” Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back,

but they find their way blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The

thorns catch at their slacks(thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts,Justine will

think later…when she has timeto think) and pull out little puffs of cloth.

Justine is thinking she should put an arm around her friend’s shoulder and tumble them

both over the thigh-high wall—do a backflip, just like in gym class all those years

ago—but before she can make up her mind to do it, the blue van is by them, and at the

moment it passes, it’s more or less on the road and not a danger to them.

Justine watches it go by in a muffled blare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her

chest, the taste of something her body has dumped—adrenaline would be the most likely

possibility—flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill the little blue van

once again lurches across the white line. The driver corrects the

drift…no,overcorrects.Once more the blue van is on the righthand shoulder, spuming up

yellow dust for fifty yards.

“Gosh, I hope Stephen King sees that asshole,” Elvira says. They have passed the writer

half a mile or so back, and said hello. Probably everyone in town has seen him on his

afternoon walk, at one time or another.

As if the driver of the blue van has heard Elvira Toothaker call him an asshole, the van’s

brakelights flare. The van suddenly pulls all the way off the road and stops. When the door

opens, the ladies hear a louder blast of rock and roll music. They also hear the driver—a

man—yelling at someone (Elvira and Justine just pity the person stuck driving withthatguy

on such a beautiful June afternoon). “You leave ’at alone!” he shouts. “That ain’t yoahs,

y’hear?” And then the driver reaches back into the van, brings out a cane, and uses it to help him over the rock wall and into the bushes. The van sits rumbling on the soft shoulder,

driver’s door open, emitting blue exhaust from one end and rock from the other.

“What’s hedoing?”Justine asks, a little nervously.

“Taking a leak would be my guess,” her friend replies. “But if Mr. King back there is

lucky, maybe doing Number Two, instead. That might give him time to get off Route 7 and

back onto Turtleback Lane.”

Suddenly Justine doesn’t feel like picking berries anymore. She wants to go back home

and have a strong cup of tea.

The man comes limping briskly out of the bushes and uses his cane to help him back over the rock wall.

“I guess he didn’t need to Number Two,” Elvira says, and as the bad driver climbs back

into his blue van, the two going-on-old women look at each other and burst into giggles.

Twelve

Roland watched the old man give the woman instructions—something about using

Warrington’s Road as a shortcut—and then Jake opened his eyes. To Roland the boy

looked unutterably weary.

“I was able to make him stop and take a leak,” he said. “Now he’s fixing something behind

his seat. I don’t know what it is, but it won’t keep him busy for long. Roland, this is bad.

We’re awfully late. We have to go.”

Roland looked at the woman, hoping that his decision not to replace her behind the wheel

with the old man had been the right one. “Do you know where to go? Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said. “Up Warrington’s to Route 7. We sometimes go to dinner at Warrington’s.