Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It’s not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!”
Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.
“The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent.
The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don’t like em all—Overholser’s a little hard to swallow—
but you feel you know em.”
Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn’t even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable— farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell. The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman’s sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?
As for that, Eddie says I have none, he thought.
“The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem,” Eddie was continuing. “And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy tale villains. I know it’s real—people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real, the crying afterward will be real—but at the same time there’s something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery.”
“And New York?” Roland asked. “How did that feel to you?”
“The same,” Eddie said. “I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on the table after Jake took Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book… and then, out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up! That fuck!”
Here, here, now!” Susannah called merrily from behind them. “No profanity, boys.” Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with it.
Roland said, “Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not exactly unreality, Roland. It—”
“Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away. Doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “When I’m with her.”
He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.
THREE
The light was fading out of the day. They sat around the fire and let it go. What little appetite they’d been able to muster had been easily satisfied by the muffin-balls Susannah and Jake had brought back to camp. Roland had been meditating on something Slightman had said, and more deeply than was probably healthy. Now he pushed it aside still half-chewed and said, “Some of us or all of us may meet later tonight in the city of New York.”
“I only hope I get to go this time,” Susannah said.
“That’s as ka will,” Roland said evenly. “The important thing is that you stay together. If there’s only one who makes the journey, I think it’s apt to be you who goes, Eddie. If only one makes the journey, that one should stay exactly where he… or mayhap she… is until the bells start again.”
“The kammen,” Eddie said. “That’s what Andy called em.”
“Do you all understand that?”
They nodded, and looking into their faces, Roland realized that each one of them was reserving the right to decide what to do when the time came, based upon the circumstances. Which was exactly right. They were either gunslingers or they weren’t, after all.
He surprised himself by uttering a brief snort of a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Jake asked.
“I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions,” Roland said.
“If you mean us,” Eddie said, “lemme tell you something, Roland—you’re not exacdy Norman Normal yourself.”
“I suppose not,” Roland said. “If it’s a group that crosses— two, a trio, perhaps all of us—we should join hands when the chimes start.”
“Andy said we had to concentrate on each other,” Eddie said. “To keep from getting lost.”
Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus—a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse—than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: ” Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet. . . Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine… Ye must bow down and worship the iyyy-DOL!”
“What is it?”
“A field-chant,” she said. “The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa’s cotton. But times change.” She smiled. “I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk.”
“I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too,” Jake breathed. “Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table.”
Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. “Why do you say so, sugar?”
Eddie said, “Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since… what’d he say, Jake?”
“Not the Village, Bleecker Street,” Jake said, laughing a little. “Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica.”
“It is,” Eddie said, “and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake’s saying, I’d go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn’t even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that’s just how things work in the Land of Nineteen.”
“In any case,” Roland said, “those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand’s reach, all the time.”
“I don’t think I’ll be there,” Jake said.
“Why do you say so, Jake?” the gunslinger asked, surprised.
“Because I’ll never fall asleep,” Jake said. “I’m too excited.”
But eventually they all slept.
FOUR
He knows it’s a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman’s chance remark, and yet he can’t escape it. Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there’s a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it. I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart’s foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world.
The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom’s men advance relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending, the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes. Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom’s eagle-eyed son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends, a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet’s column was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert… the sound of their guns… and oh, when Alain cried out their names—
And now they’re at the top and there’s nowhere left to run. Behind them to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt— what five hundred miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of the stone faces, and Grissom’s screaming, advancing men. Roland and his own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left, and that’s a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts— against a dozen. That’s all that’s left of them now,
here at the top of Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the guns of his best friends— stolid, dependable Alain, who could have ridden on to safety but chose not to— and Cuthbert has been shot. How many times’? Five”? Six? His shirt is soaked crimson to his skin. One side of his face has been drowned in blood; the eye on that side bulges sightlessly on his cheek. Yet he still has Roland’s horn, the one which was blown by Arthur Eld, or so the stories did say. He will not give it back. “For I blow it sweeter than you ever did, ” he tells Roland, laughing. “You can have it again when I’m dead. Neglect not to pluck it up, Roland, for it’s your property.”