purple fuck-me shoes with three-inch heels. She glanced first at the cop, then at Jake to see
what the cop was looking at. When she got a good look, she stopped cold. One of her hands
drifted up and touched her throat. A man bumped into her and told her to watch where the
damn-hell she was going. The young woman who was probably not a librarian took no
notice whatever. Now Jake saw that four or five other people had stopped as well. All were staring at the key. They were gathering as people sometimes will around a very good
three-card-monte dealer plying his trade on a streetcorner.
You’re doing a great job of being inconspicuous, he thought. Oh yeah. He glanced over the
cop’s shoulder, and his eye caught a sign on the far side of the street. Denby’s Discount
Drug, it said.
“My name’s Tom Denby,” he told the cop. “It says so right here on my discount bowling card—right?”
“Right, right,” the cop breathed. He had lost all interest in Jake; he was only interested in the key. The little coins of reflected light bounced and spun on his face.
“And you’re not looking for anybody named Tom Denby, are you?”
“No,” the cop said. “Never heard of him.”
Now there were at least half a dozen people gathered around the cop, all of them staring
with silent wonder at the silver key in Jake’s hand.
“So I can go, can’t I?”
“Huh? Oh! Oh, sure—go, for your father’s sake!”
“Thanks,” Jake said, but for a moment he wasn’t sure how to go. He was hemmed in by a
silent crowd of zombies, and more were joining it all the time. They were only coming to
see what the deal was, he realized, but the ones who saw the key just stopped dead and
stared.
He got to his feet and backed slowly up the wide bank steps, holding the key out in front of
him like a lion-tamer with a chair. When he got to the wide concrete plaza at the top, he
stuffed it back into his pants pockets, turned, and fled.
He stopped just once on the far side of the plaza, and looked back. The small group of
people around the place where he had been standing was coming slowly back to life. They
looked around at each other with dazed expressions, then walked on. The cop glanced
vacantly to his left, to his right, and then straight up at the sky, as if trying to remember how he had gotten here and what he had been meaning to do. Jake had seen enough. It was time
to find a subway station and get his ass over to Brooklyn before anything else weird could
happen.
13
AT QUARTER OF TWO that afternoon he walked slowly up the steps of the subway
station and stood on the corner of Castle and Brooklyn Ave- nues, looking at the sandstone
towers of Co-Op City. He waited for that feeling of sureness and direction—that feeling
that was like being able to remember forward in time—to overtake him. It didn’t come.
Nothing came. He was just a kid standing on a hot Brooklyn streetcorner with his short
shadow lying at his feet like a tired pet.
Well, I’m here . . , now what do I do?
Jake discovered he didn’t have the slightest idea.
14
ROLAND’S SMALL BAND OF travellers reached the crest of the long, gentle hill they
had been climbing and stood looking southeast. For a long time none of them spoke.
Susannah opened her mouth twice, then closed it again. For the first time in her life as a
woman, she was completely speechless.
Before them, an almost endless plain dozed in the long golden light of a summer’s
afternoon. The grass was lush, emerald green, and very high. Groves of trees with long,
slender trunks and wide, spreading tops dotted the plain. Susannah had once seen similar
trees, she thought, in a travelogue film about Australia.
The road they had been following swooped down the far side of the hill and then ran
straight as a string into the southeast, a bright white lane cutting through the grass. To the
west, some miles off, she could see a herd of large animals grazing peacefully. They looked
like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland.
This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the
end.
That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had
encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from
that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward
the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to
bank.
And she could see the city.
It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the
horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or
four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool’s game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled
her with silent wonder . . . and a drop, aching homesickness for New York. She thought, I
believe I’d do most anything just to see the Manhat- tan skyline from the Triborough Bridge
again.
Then she had to smile, because that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that she wouldn’t trade
Roland’s world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating. And
her lover was here. In New York—the New York of her own time, at least—they would
have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot’s crude, cruel jokes: a black
woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a
tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been
carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to
jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and
herself, the world’s last three gunslingers.
She took Eddie’s hand and felt it close over hers, warm and reassuring.
Roland pointed. “That must be the Send River,” he said in a low voice. “I never thought to see it in my life . . . wasn’t even sure it was real, like the Guardians.”
“It’s so lovely,” Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast
landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing
the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun
sank toward the horizon. “It’s the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were
settled—even before the Indians came.” She raised her free hand and pointed toward the
place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. “There’s your city,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It looks okay,” Eddie said. “Is that possible, Roland? Could it still be pretty much intact.
Did the old-timers build that well?”
“Anything is possible in these times,” Roland said, but he sounded doubtful. “You shouldn’t get your hopes up, though, Eddie.”
“Huh? No.” But Eddie’s hopes were up. That dimly sketched skyline had awakened
homesickness in Susannah’s heart; in Eddie’s it kindled a sudden blaze of supposition. If
the city was still there—and it clearly was—it might still be populated, and maybe not just
by the subhuman things Roland had met under the mountains, either. The city-dwellers
might be
(Americans, Eddie’s subconscious whispered)
intelligent and helpful; they might, in fact, spell the difference between success and failure
for the quest of the pilgrims … or even between life and death. In Eddie’s mind a vision
(partly cribbed from movies like The Last Starfighter and The Dark Crystal) gleamed brightly: a council of gnarled but dignified City Elders who would serve them a whopping
meal drawn from the unspoiled stores of the city (or perhaps from special gardens cradled
within environmental bubbles) and who would, as he and Roland and Susannah ate
themselves silly, explain exactly what lay ahead and what it all meant. Their parting gift to
the wayfarers would be an AAA-approved Tour Guide map with the best route to the Dark
Tower marked in red.
Eddie did not know the phrase deus ex machina, but he knew—had now grown up enough
to know—that such wise and kindly folk lived mostly in comic books and B-movies. The
idea was intoxicating, all the same: an enclave of civilization in this dangerous, mostly
empty world; wise old elf-men who would tell them just what the fuck it was they were
supposed to be doing. And the fabulous shapes of the city disclosed in that hazy skyline