The gunslinger stripped twigs for kindling, then laid his fuel around them in his
usual fashion, building a kind of wooden chimney in the breakdown lane. As he did it, Eddie strolled across to the median strip and stood there, hands in pockets, looking east. After a few moments, Jake and Oy joined him.
Roland produced his flint and steel, scraped fire into the shaft of his chimney, and soon the little campfire was burning.
“Roland!” Eddie called. “Suze! Come over here! Look at this!”
Susannah started rolling her chair toward Eddie, then Roland—after a final check of his campfire—took hold of the handles and pushed her.
“Look at what?” Susannah asked.
Eddie pointed. At first Susannah saw nothing, although the turnpike was perfectly visible even beyond the point where the thinny closed in again, perhaps three miles ahead. Then … yes, she might see something. Maybe. A kind of shape, at the farthest edge of vision. If not for the fading daylight…
“Is it a building?” Jake asked. “Cripes, it looks like it’s built right across the highway!”
“What about it, Roland?” Eddie asked. “You’ve got the best eyes in the universe.”
For a time the gunslinger said nothing, only looked up the median strip with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. At last he said, “We’ll see it better when we get closer.”
“Oh, come on!” Eddie said. “I mean, holy shit! Do you know what it is or not?”
“We’ll see it better when we get closer,” the gunslinger repeated … which was, of course, no answer at all. He moseyed back across the east-bound lanes to check on his campfire, bootheels clicking on the pavement. Susannah looked at Jake and Eddie. She shrugged. They shrugged back . . . and then Jake burst into bright peals of laughter. Usually, Susannah thought, the kid acted more like an eighteen-year-old than a boy of eleven, but that laughter made him sound about nine-going-onten, and she didn’t mind a bit.
She looked down at Oy, who was looking at them earnestly and rolling his shoulders in an effort to shrug.
8
They ate the leaf-wrapped delicacies Eddie called gunslinger burritos, drawing closer to the fire and feeding it more wood as the dark drew down. Somewhere
south a bird cried out—it was just about the loneliest sound he had ever heard in his life, Eddie reckoned. None of them talked much, and it occurred to him that, at this time of their day, hardly anyone ever did. As if the time when the earth swapped day for dark was special, a time that somehow closed them off from the powerful fellowship Roland called ka-tet.
Jake fed Oy small scraps of dried deermeat from his last burrito; Susannah sat on her bedroll, legs crossed beneath her hide smock, looking dreamily into the fire; Roland lay back on his elbows, looking up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to melt away from the stars. Looking up himself, Eddie saw that Old Star and Old Mother were gone, their places taken by Polaris and the Big Dipper. This might not be his world— Takuro automobiles, the Kansas City Monarchs, and a food franchise called Boing Boing Burgers all suggested it wasn’t—but Eddie thought it was too close for comfort. Maybe, he thought, the world next door.
When the bird cried in the distance again, he roused himself and looked at Roland.
“You had something you were going to tell us,” he said. “A thrilling tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn’t it?”
For a moment longer the gunslinger continued to look up at the sky— now it was Roland who must find himself adrift in the constellations, Eddie realized—and then he shifted his gaze to his friends. He looked strangely apologetic, strangely uneasy. “Would you think I was cozening,” he said, “if I asked for one more day to think of these things? Or perhaps it’s a night to dream of them that I really want. They are old things, dead things, perhaps, but I. . .” He raised his hands in a kind of distracted gesture. “Some things don’t rest easy even when they’re dead.
Their bones cry out from the ground.”
“There are ghosts,” Jake said, and in his eyes Eddie saw a shadow of the horror he must have felt inside the house in Dutch Hill. The horror he must have felt when the Doorkeeper came out of the wall and reached for him. “Sometimes there are ghosts, and sometimes they come back.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Sometimes there are, and sometimes they do.”
“Maybe it’s better not to brood,” Susannah said. “Sometimes—especially when you know a thing’s going to be hard—it’s better just to get on your horse and ride.”
Roland thought this over carefully, then raised his eyes to look at her. “At tomorrow night’s fire I will tell you of Susan,” he said. “This I promise on my father’s name.”
“Do we need to hear?” Eddie asked abruptly. He was almost astounded to hear this question coming out of his mouth; no one had been more curious about the gunslinger’s past than Eddie himself. “I mean, if it really hurts, Roland . . . hurts big-time . . . maybe…”
“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may.
There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”
“Is it a Western?” Jake asked suddenly.
Roland looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t take your meaning, Jake. Gilead is a Barony of the Western World, yes, and Mejis as well, but—”
“It’ll be a Western,” Eddie said. “All Roland’s stories are Westerns, when you get right down to it.” He lay back and pulled his blanket over him. Faintly, from both east and west, he could hear the warble of the thinny. He checked in his pocket for the bullets Roland had given him, and nodded with satisfaction when he felt them.
He reckoned he could sleep without them tonight, but he would want them again tomorrow. They weren’t done tumpikin’ just yet.
Susannah leaned over him, kissed the tip of his nose. “Done for the day, sugar?”
“Yep,” Eddie said, and laced his hands together behind his head. “It’s not every day that I hook a ride on the world’s fastest train, destroy the world’s smartest computer, and then discover that everyone’s been scragged by the flu. All before dinner, too. Shit like that makes a man tired.” Eddie smiled and closed his eyes.
He was still smiling when sleep took him.
9
In his dream, they were all standing on the comer of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, looking over the short board fence and into the weedy vacant lot behind it. They were wearing their Mid-World clothes—a motley combination of deerskin and old shirts, mostly held together with spit and shoelaces—but none of the pedestrians hurrying by on Second seemed to notice. No one noticed the billy-bumbler in Jake’s arms or the artillery they were packing, either.
Because we’re ghosts. Eddie thought. We’re ghosts and we don’t rest easy.
On the fence there were handbills—one for the Sex Pistols (a reunion tour, according to the poster, and Eddie thought that was pretty funny— the Pistols was one group that was never going to get back together), one for a comic, Adam Sandier, that Eddie had never heard of, one for a movie called The Craft, about teenage witches. Beyond that one, written in letters the dusky pink of summer roses, was this:
See the bear of fearsome size!
All the world’s within his eyes.
time grows thin, the past’s a riddle;
The tower awaits you in the middle.
“There, ” Jake said, pointing. “The rose. See how it awaits us, there in the middle of the lot. ”
“Yes, it’s very beautiful, ” Susannah said. Then she pointed to the sign standing near the rose and facing Second Avenue. Her voice and her eyes were troubled.
“But what about that? ”
According to the sign, two outfits—Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate—were going to combine on something called Turtle Bay Condominiums, said condos to be erected on this very spot. When? coming soon was all the sign had to say in that regard.
” I wouldn’t worry about that, ” Jake said. “That sign was here before. It’s probably old as the hi—”
At that moment the revving sound of an engine tore into the air. From beyond the fence, on the Forty-sixth Street side of the lot, chugs of dirty brown exhaust ascended like bad-news smoke signals. Suddenly the boards on that side burst open, and a huge red bulldozer lunged through. Even the blade was red, although the words slashed across its scoop—all hail the crimson king—were written in a yellow as bright as panic. Sitting in the peak-seat, his rotting face leering at them from above the controls, was the man who had kidnapped Jake from the bridge over the River Send—their old pal Gasher. On the front of his cocked-back hardhat, the words lamerk foundry stood out in black. Above them, a single staring eye had been painted.