Stephen King – The Dark Tower

His thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock against which it

had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in blood. He looked worse than

Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn’t kill him, he’d probably live through this. Again he saw Jake

seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller

body.

“You again,” King said in a low voice.

“You remember me.”

“Yes. Now.” King licked his lips. “Thirsty.”

Roland had nothing to drink, and wouldn’t have given more than enough to wet King’s

lips even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting could

lead to choking. “Sorry,” he said.

“No. You’re not.” He licked his lips again. “Jake?”

“Over there, on the ground. You know him?”

King tried to smile. “Wrotehim. Where’s the one that was with you before? Where’s

Eddie?”

“Dead,” Roland said. “In the Devar-Toi.”

King frowned. “Devar…? I don’t know that.”

“No. That’s why we’re here. Why we had to come here. One of my friends is dead, another

may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one lazy, fearful man stopped doing the

job for which ka intended him.”

No traffic on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the chirping

birds, the world was silent. They might have been frozen in time.Perhaps we are, Roland

thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might be possible.Anything might be

possible.

“I lost the Beam,” King said from where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold.

Roland reached under King and helped him to sit up. The writer cried out in pain as the

swollen ball of his right hip grated in the shattered, compressed remains of its socket, but

he did not protest. Roland pointed into the sky. Fat white fair-weather clouds—los

ángeles,the cowpokes of Mejis had called them—hung motionless in the blue, except for

those directly above them. There they hied rapidly across the sky, as if blown by a narrow

wind.

“There!” Roland whispered furiously into the writer’s scraped, dirt-clogged ear. “Directly

above you! All around you! Does thee not feel it? Does thee notsee it?”

“Yes,” King said. “I see it now.”

“Aye, and ’twas always there. You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away. My

friend had to save you for you to see it again.”

Roland’s left hand fumbled in his belt and brought out a shell. At first his fingers wouldn’t do their old, dexterous trick; they were trembling too badly. He was only able to still them

by reminding himself that the longer it took him to do this, the greater the chance that they would be interrupted, or that Jake would die while he was busy with this miserable excuse

for a man.

He looked up and saw the woman holding his gun on the driver of the van. That was

good.She was good: why hadn’t Gan given the story of the Tower to someone like her? In

any case, his instinct to keep her with them had been true. Even the infernal racket of dogs

and bumbler had quieted. Oy was licking the dirt and oil from Jake’s face, while in the van,

Pistol and Bullet were gobbling up the hamburger, this time without interference from their

master.

Roland turned back to King, and the shell did its old sure dance across the backs of his

fingers. King went under almost immediately, as most people did when they’d been

hypnotized before. His eyes were still open, but now they seemed to look through the

gunslinger, beyond him.

Roland’s heart screamed at him to get through this as quickly as he could, but his head

knew better.You must not botch it. Not unless you want to render Jake’s sacrifice

worthless .

The woman was looking at him, and so was the van’s driver as he sat in the open door of

his vehicle. Sai Tassenbaum was fighting it, Roland saw, but Bryan Smith had followed

King into the land of sleep. This didn’t surprise the gunslinger much. If the man had the

slightest inkling of what he’d done here, he’d be apt to seize any opportunity for escape.

Even a temporary one.

The gunslinger turned his attention back to the man who was, he supposed, his biographer.

He started just as he had before. Days ago in his own life. Over two decades ago in the

writer’s.

“Stephen King, do you see me?”

“Gunslinger, I see you very well.”

“When did you last see me?”

“When we lived in Bridgton. When my tet was young. When I was just learning how to

write.” A pause, and then he gave what Roland supposed was, for him, the most important

way of marking time, a thing that was different for every man: “When I was still drinking.”

“Are you deep asleep now?”

“Deep.”

“Are you under the pain?”

“Under it, yes. I thank you.”

The billy-bumbler howled again. Roland looked around, terribly afraid of what it might

signify. The woman had gone to Jake and was kneeling beside him. Roland was relieved to

see Jake put an arm around her neck and draw her head down so he could speak into her ear.

If he was strong enough to do that—

Stop it! You saw the changed shape of him under his shirt. You can’t afford to waste time

on hope.

There was a cruel paradox here: because he loved Jake, he had to leave the business of

Jake’s dying to Oy and a woman they had met less than an hour ago.

Never mind. His business now was with King. Should Jake pass into the clearing while his

back was turned…if ka will say so, let it be so.

Roland summoned his will and concentration. He focused them to a burning point, then

turned his attention to the writer once more. “Are you Gan?” he asked abruptly, not

knowing why this question came to him—only that it was theright question.

“No,” King said at once. Blood ran into his mouth from the cut on his head and he spat it

out, never blinking. “Once I thought I was, but that was just the booze. And pride, I

suppose. No writer is Gan—no painter, no sculptor, no maker of music. We are kas-ka Gan.

Notka -Gan butkas -ka Gan. Do you understand? Do you…do you ken?”

“Yes,” Roland said. The prophets of Gan or the singers of Gan: it could signify either or

both. And now he knew why he had asked. “And the song you sing isVes’ -Ka Gan. Isn’t it?”

“Oh,yes !” King said, and smiled. “The Song of the Turtle. It’s far too lovely for the likes

of me, who can hardly carry a tune!”

“I don’t care,” Roland said. He thought as hard and as clearly as his dazed mind would

allow. “And now you’ve been hurt.”

“Am I paralyzed?”

“I don’t know.”Nor care. “All I know is that you’ll live, and when you can write again,

you’ll listen for the Song of the Turtle, Ves’-Ka Gan, as you did before. Paralyzed or not.

And this time you’ll sing until the song is done.”

“All right.”

“You’ll—”

“And Urs-Ka Gan, the Song of the Bear,” King interrupted him. Then he shook his head,

although this clearly hurt him despite the hypnotic state he was in. “Urs-A-Ka Gan.”

The Cry of the Bear? TheScream of the Bear? Roland didn’t know which. He would have

to hope it didn’t matter, that it was no more than a writer’s quibble.

A car hauling a motor home went past the scene of the accident without slowing, then a

pair of large motor-bicycles sped by heading the other way. And an oddly persuasive

thought came to Roland: time hadn’t stopped, but they were, for the time being,dim . Being

protected in that fashion by the Beam, which was no longer under attack and thus able to

help, at least a little.

Four

Tell him again. There must be no misunderstanding. And no weakening, as he weakened

before.

He bent down until his face was before King’s face, their noses nearly touching. “This

time you’ll sing until the song is done, write until the tale is done. Do you truly ken?”

“ ‘And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,’ ” King said dreamily. “I

wish I could write that.”

“So do I.” And he did, more than anything. Despite his sorrow, there were no tears yet; his

eyes felt like hot stones in his head. Perhaps the tears would come later, when the truth of

what had happened here had a chance to sink in a little.