“First the Tower again,” Roland said, “and the beginning of the way there. I saw the fall of Gilead, and the triumph of the Good Man. We’d put those things back a mere twenty months or so by destroying the tankers and the oilpatch. I could do nothing about that, but it showed me something I could do. There was a certain knife. The blade had been treated with an especially potent poison, something from a distant Mid-World Kingdom called Garlan. Stuff so strong even the tiniest cut would cause almost instant death. A wandering singer—in truth, John Parson’s eldest nephew—had brought this knife to court. The man he gave it to was the
castle’s chief of domestic staff. This man was to pass the knife on to the actual assassin. My father was not meant to see the sun come up on the morning after the banquet.” He smiled at them grimly. “Because of what I saw in the Wizard’s Glass, the knife never reached the hand that would have used it, and there was a new chief of domestics by the end of that week. These are pretty tales I tell you, are they not? Aye, very pretty, indeed.”
“Did you see the person the knife was meant for?” Susannah asked. “The actual killer?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else? Did you see anything else?” Jake asked. The plan to murder Roland’s father didn’t seem to hold much interest for him.
“Yes.” Roland looked puzzled. “Shoes. Just for a minute. Shoes tumbling through the air. At first I thought they were autumn leaves. And when I saw what they really were, they were gone and I was lying on my bed with the ball hugged in my arms . . . pretty much the way I carried it back from Mejis. My father … as I’ve said, his surprise when he looked inside the bag was very great, indeed.”
You told him who had the knife with the special poison on it, Susannah thought, Jeeves the Butler, or whoever, but you didn’t tell him who was supposed to actually use it, did you, sugar? Why not? Because you wanted to take care of dat little spot o’ work yo ownself? But before she could ask, Eddie was asking a question of his own.
“Shoes? Flying through the air? Does that mean anything to you now?”
Roland shook his head.
“Tell us about the rest of what you saw in it,” Susannah said.
He gave her a look of such terrible pain that what Susannah had only suspected immediately solidified to fact in her mind. She looked away from him and groped for Eddie’s hand.
“I cry your pardon, Susannah, but I cannot. Not now. For now, I’ve told all I can.”
“All right,” Eddie said. “All right, Roland, that’s cool.”
“Ool,” Oy agreed.
“Did you ever see the witch again?” Jake asked.
For a long time it seemed Roland would not answer this, either, but in the end he did.
“Yes. She wasn’t done with me. Like my dreams of Susan, she followed me. All
the way from Mejis, she followed me.”
“What do you mean?” Jake asked in a low, awed voice. “Cripes, Roland, what do you mean?”
“Not now.” He got up. “It’s time we were on our way again.” He nodded to the building which floated ahead of them; the sun was just now clearing its battlements. “Yon glitter-dome’s a good distance away, but I think we can reach it this afternoon, if we move brisk. ‘Twould be best. It’s not a place I’d reach after nightfall, if that can be avoided.”
“Do you know what it is yet?” Susannah asked.
“Trouble,” he repeated. “And in our road.”
4
For awhile that morning, the thinny warbled so loudly that not even the bullets in their ears would entirely stop up the sound; at its worst, Susannah felt as if the bridge of her nose would simply disintegrate, and when she looked at Jake, she saw he was weeping copiously—not crying the way people do when they’re sad, but the way they do when their sinuses are in total revolt. She couldn’t get the saw-player the kid had mentioned out of her mind. Sounds Hawaiian, she thought over and over again as Eddie pushed her grimly along in the new wheelchair, weaving in and out of the stalled vehicles. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Sounds fucking Hawaiian, doesn’t it. Miss Oh So Black and Pretty?
On both sides of the turnpike the thinny lapped all the way up to the embankment, casting its twitching, misshapen reflections of trees and grain elevators, seeming to watch the pilgrims pass as hungry animals in a zoo might watch plump children.
Susannah would find herself thinking of the thinny in Eyebolt Canyon, reaching out hungrily through the smoke for Latigo’s milling men, pulling them in (and some going in on their own, walking like zombies in a horror movie), and then she would find herself thinking of the guy in Central Park again, the wacko with the saw. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Counting one thinny, and it sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it?
Just when she thought she could stand it not a moment longer, the thinny began to draw back from 1-70 again, and its humming warble at last began to fade.
Susannah was eventually able to pull the bullets out of her ears. She tucked them
into the side-pocket of her chair with a hand that shook slightly.
“That was a bad one,” Eddie said. His voice sounded clogged and weepy. She looked around at him and saw his cheeks were wet, his eyes red. “Take it easy, Suzie-pie,” he said. “It’s my sinuses, that’s all. That sound kills em.”
“Me, too,” Susannah said.
“My sinuses are okay, but my head aches,” Jake said. “Roland, do you have any more aspirin?”
Roland stopped, rummaged, and found the bottle.
“Did you ever see Clay Reynolds again?” Jake asked, after swallowing the pills with water from the skin he carried.
“No, but I know what happened to him. He got a bunch together, some of them deserters from Parson’s army, went to robbing banks … in toward our part of the world, this was, but by then bank-thieves and stage-robbers didn’t have much to fear from gunslingers.”
“The gunslingers were busy with Farson,” Eddie said.
“Yes. But Reynolds and his men were trapped by a smart sheriff who turned the main street of a town called Oakley into a killing-zone. Six of the ten in the gang were killed outright. The rest were hung. Reynolds was one of those. This was less than a year later, during the time of Wide Earth.” He paused, then said: “One of those shot dead in the killing-zone was Coral Thorin. She had become Reynolds’s woman; rode and killed with the rest of them.”
They went on in silence for a bit. In the distance, the thinny warbled its endless song. Jake suddenly ran ahead to a parked camper. A note had been left under the wiper blade on the driver’s side. By standing on his toes, he was just able to reach it. He scanned it, frowning.
“What does it say?” Eddie asked.
Jake handed it over. Eddie looked, then passed it to Susannah, who read it in turn and gave it to Roland. He looked, then shook his head. “I can make out only a few words— old woman, dark man. What does the rest say? Read it to me.”
Jake took it back. ” ‘The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abagail.’ ” He paused. “Then, down here, it says, ‘The dark man is in the west.
Maybe Vegas.’ ”
Jake looked up at the gunslinger, the note fluttering in his hand, his face puzzled and uneasy. But Roland was looking toward the palace which shimmered across
the highway—the palace that was not in the west but in the east, the palace that was light, not dark.
“In the west,” Roland said. “Dark man, Dark Tower, and always in the west.”
“Nebraska’s west of here, too,” Susannah said hesitantly. “I don’t know if that matters, this Abagail person, but…”
“I think she’s part of another story,” Roland said.
“But a story close to this one,” Eddie put in. “Next door, maybe. Close enough to swap sugar for salt… or start arguments.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Roland said, “and we may have business with the ‘old woman’ and the ‘dark man’ yet… but today our business is east. Come on.”
They began walking again.
5
“What about Sheemie?” Jake asked after awhile.
Roland laughed, partly in surprise at the question, partly in pleased remembrance.
“He followed us. It couldn’t have been easy for him, and it must have been damned scary in places—there were wheels and wheels of wild country between Mejis and Gilead, and plenty of wild folks, too. Worse than just folks, mayhap.
But ka was with him, and he showed up in time for Year’s End Fair. He and that damned mule.”