him past the Warrington’s intersection, down Route 7 as far as the Slab City Road, then all
the way back Route 7 to Berry Hill, bypassing Warrington’s Road. This walk returns him
to his house by way of the north end of Turtleback Lane, and is four miles. This is the one
he means to take today, but when he gets back to the intersection of 7 and Warrington’s he
stops, playing with the idea of going back the short way. He’s always careful about
walking on the shoulder of the public road, though traffic is light on Route 7, even in
summer; the only time this highway ever gets busy is when the Fryeburg Fair’s going on,
and that doesn’t start until the first week of October. Most of the sightlines are good,
anyway. If a bad driver’s coming (or a drunk) you can usually spot him half a mile away,
which gives you plenty of time to vacate the area. There’s only one blind hill, and that’s the one directly beyond the Warrington’s intersection. Yet that’s also anaerobichill, one that
gets the old heart really pumping, and isn’t that what he’s doing all these stupid walks for?
To promote what the TV talking heads call “heart healthiness?” He’s quit drinking, he’s quit doping, he’s almostquit smoking, he exercises. What else is there?
Yet a voice whispers to him just the same.Get off the main road,it says. Go on back to the
house. You’ll have an extra hour before you have to meet the rest of them for the party on
the other side of the lake. You can do some work. Maybe start the nextDark Tower story;
you know it’s been on your mind.
Aye, so it has, but he already has a story to work on, and he likes it fine. Going back to the tale of the Tower means swimming in deep water. Maybe drowning there. Yet he suddenly
realizes, standing here at this crossroads, that if he goes back early hewillbegin. He won’t
be able to help himself. He’ll have to listen to what he sometimes thinks of as Ves’-Ka Gan,
the Song of the Turtle (and sometimes as Susannah’s Song). He’ll junk the current story,
turn his back on the safety of the land, and swim out into that dark water once again. He’s
done it four times before, but this time he’ll have to swim all the way to the other side.
Swim or drown.
“No,” he says. He speaks aloud, and why not? There’s no one to hear him out here. He
perceives, faintly, the attenuate sound of an approaching vehicle—or is it two? one on
Route 7 and one on Warrington’s Road?—but that’s all.
“No,” he says again. “I’m gonna walk, and then I’m gonna party. No more writing today.
Especially notthat.”
And so, leaving the intersection behind, he begins making his way up the steep hill with its
short sightline. He begins to walk toward the sound of the oncoming Dodge Caravan,
which is also the sound of his oncoming death. The ka of the rational world wants him dead;
that of thePrimwants him alive, and singing his song. So it is that on this sunny afternoon in western Maine, the irresistible force rushes toward the immovable object, and for the first
time since the Primreceded, all worlds and all existence turn toward the Dark Tower which
stands at the far end of Can’-Ka No Rey, which is to say the Red Fields of None. Even the
Crimson King ceases his angry screaming. For it is the Dark Tower that will decide.
“Resolution demands a sacrifice,” King says, and although no one hears but the birds and
he has no idea what this means, he is not disturbed. He’s always muttering to himself; it’s
as though there is a Cave of Voices in his head, one full of brilliant—but not
necessarilyintelligent—mimics.
He walks, swinging his arms beside his bluejeaned thighs, unaware that his heart is
(isn’t)
finishing its last few beats, that his mind is
(isn’t)
thinking its last few thoughts, that his voices are
(aren’t)
making their last Delphic pronouncements.
“Ves’-Ka Gan,” he says, amused by the sound of it—yet attracted, too. He has promised
himself that he’ll try not to stuff his Dark Tower fantasies with unpronounceable words in
some made-up (not to say fucked-up) language—his editor, Chuck Verrill in New York,
will only cut most of them if he does—but his mind seems to be filling up with such words
and phrases all the same: ka, ka-tet, sai, soh, can-toi (that one at least is from another book of his,Desperation),taheen. Can Tolkien’s Cirith Ungol and H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Blind
Fiddler, Nyarlathotep, be far behind?
He laughs, then begins to sing a song one of his voices has given him. He thinks he will
certainly use it in the next gunslinger book, when he finally allows the Turtle its voice
again. “Commala-come-one,” he sings as he walks, “there’s a young man with a gun. That
young man lost his honey when she took it on the run.”
And is that young man Eddie Dean? Or is it Jake Chambers?
“Eddie,” he says out loud. “Eddie’s the gunny with the honey.” He’s so deep in thought
that at first he doesn’t see the roof of the blue Dodge Caravan as it comes over the short
horizon ahead of him and so does not realize this vehicle is not on the highway at all, but on the soft shoulder where he is walking. Nor does he hear the oncoming roar of the pickup
truck behind him.
Eighteen
Bryan hears the scrape of the cooler’s lid even over the funky rip-rap beat of the music,
and when he looks in the rearview mirror he’s both dismayed and outraged to see that
Bullet, always the more forward of the two rotties, has leaped from the storage area at the
rear of the van into the passenger compartment. Bullet’s rear legs are up on the dirty seat,
his stubby tail is wagging happily, and his nose is buried in Bryan’s cooler.
At this point any reasonable driver would pull over to the side of the road, stop his vehicle, and take care of his wayward animal. Bryan Smith, however, has never gotten high marks
for reason when behind the wheel, and has the driving record to prove it. Instead of pulling
over, he twists around to the right, steering with his left hand and shoving ineffectually at the top of the rottweiler’s flat head with his right.
“Leave ’at alone!” he shouts at Bullet as his minivan drifts first toward the righthand
shoulder and then onto it. “Din’ you hear me, Bullet? Are you foolish? Leave ’atalone!”He
actually succeeds in shoving the dog’s head up for a moment, but there’s no fur for his
fingers to grasp and Bullet, while no genius, is smart enough to know he has at least one
more chance to grab the stuff in the white paper, the stuff radiating that entrancing red smell. He dips beneath Bryan’s hand and seizes the wrapped package of hamburger in his
jaws.
“Drop it!”Bryan screams. “You drop it right…NOW!”
In order to gain the purchase necessary to twist further in the driver’s bucket, he presses
down firmly with both feet. One of them, unfortunately, is on the accelerator. The van puts
on a burst of speed as it rushes toward the top of the hill. At this moment, in his excitement and outrage, Bryan has completely forgotten where he is (Route 7) and what he’s supposed
to be doing (driving a van). All he cares about is getting the package of meat out of Bullet’s jaws.
“Gimme it!” he shouts, tugging. Tail wagging more furiously than ever (to him it’s now a
game as well as a meal), Bullet tugs back. There’s the sound of ripping butcher’s paper.
The van is now all the way off the road. Beyond it is a grove of old pines lit by lovely
afternoon light: a haze of green and gold. Bryan thinks only of the meat. He’s not going to
eat hamburg with dog-drool on it, and you best believe it.
“Gimme it!” he says, not seeing the man in the path of his van, not seeing the truck that has now pulled up just behind the man, not seeing the truck’s passenger door open or the lanky
cowboy-type who leaps out, a revolver with big yellow grips spilling from the holster on
his hip and onto the ground as he does; Bryan Smith’s world has narrowed to one very bad
dog and one package of meat. In the struggle for the meat, blood-roses are blooming on the
butcher’s paper like tattoos.
Nineteen
“There he is!” the boy named Jake shouted, but Irene Tassenbaum didn’t need him to tell
her. Stephen King was wearing jeans, a chambray workshirt, and a baseball cap. He was
well beyond the place where the road to Warrington’s intersected with Route 7, about a