“If she’d meant to kill me, she wouldn’t have chosen a belt as her weapon. The very fact that she had made me a present—and that’s what it was, it had my initials woven into it—suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she had had a change of heart.”
Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his mother’s apartment, and that was enough.
“I think she hid because she was ashamed,” the gunslinger said. “Or because she needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain.”
“And the ball?” Susannah asked him gently. “Was it on the vanity table, where we saw it? And did she steal it from your father?”
“Yes to both,” Roland said. “Although . . . did she steal it?” He seemed to ask this question of himself. “My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes kept what he knew to himself.”
“Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other,”
Susannah said.
“Yes.”
“But, Roland . .. you surely don’t believe that your father would knowingly have allowed you to … to …”
Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he tried to smile at her question, he was unable. “Have knowingly allowed his son to kill his wife?” he asked. “No, I can’t say that. Much as I’d like to, I can’t. That he should have caused such a thing to have happened, to have deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles . . . that I cannot believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly.”
“What happened to the ball?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know. I fainted. When I awoke, my mother and 1 were still alone, one dead and one alive. No one had come to the sound of the shots—the walls of that place were thick stone, and that wing mostly empty as well. Her blood had dried.
The belt she’d made me was covered with it, but I took it, and I put it on. I wore that bloodstained gift for many years, and how I lost it is a tale for another day—I’ll tell it to you before we have done, for it bears on my quest for the Tower.
“But although no one had come to investigate the gunshots, someone had come for another reason. While I lay fainted away by my mother’s corpse, that someone came in and took the wizard’s glass away.”
“Rhea?” Eddie asked.
“I doubt she was so close in her body … but she had a way of making friends, that one. Aye, a way of making friends. I saw her again, you know.” Roland explained no further, but a stony gleam arose in his eyes. Eddie had seen it before, and knew it meant killing.
Jake had retrieved the note from R.F. and now gestured at the little drawing beneath the message. “Do you know what this means?”
“I have an idea it’s the sigul of a place I saw when I first travelled in the wizard’s glass. The land called Thunderclap.” He looked around at them, one by one. “I think it’s there that we’ll meet this man—this thing— named Flagg again.”
Roland looked back the way they had come, sleepwalking in their fine red shoes.
“The Kansas we came through was his Kansas, and the plague that emptied out that land was his plague. At least, that’s what I believe.”
“But it might not stay there,” Susannah said.
“It could travel,” Eddie said.
“To our world,” Jake said.
Still looking back toward the Green Palace, Roland said: “To your world, or any other.”
“Who’s the Crimson King?” Susannah asked abruptly.
“Susannah, I know not.”
They were quiet, then, watching Roland look toward the palace where he had faced a false wizard and a true memory and somehow opened the door back to his own world by so doing.
Our world, Eddie thought, slipping an arm around Susannah. Our world now. If we go back to America, and perhaps we’ll have to before this is over, we ‘II arrive as strangers in a strange land, no matter what when it is. This is our world now.
The world of the Beams, and the Guardians, and the Dark Tower.
“We got some daylight left,” he said to Roland, and put a hesitant hand on the gunslinger’s shoulder. When Roland immediately covered it with his own hand, Eddie smiled. “You want to use it, or what?”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Let’s use it.” He bent and shouldered his pack.
“What about the shoes?” Susannah asked, looking doubtfully at the little red pile they had made.
“Leave them here,” Eddie said. “They’ve served their purpose. Into your wheelchair, girl.” He put his arms around her and helped her in.
“All God’s children have shoes,” Roland mused. “Isn’t that what you said, Susannah?”
“Well,” she said, settling herself, “the correct dialect adds a soupcon of flavor, but you’ve got the essence, honey, yes.”
“Then we’ll undoubtedly find more shoes as God wills it,” Roland said.
Jake was looking into his knapsack, taking inventory of the foodstuffs that had been added by some unknown hand. He held up a chicken leg in a Baggie, looked at it, then looked at Eddie. “Who do you suppose packed this stuff?”
Eddie raised his eyebrows, as if to ask Jake how he could possibly be so stupid.
“The Keebler Elves,” he said. “Who else? Come on, let’s go.”
5
They clustered near the grove, five wanderers on the face of an empty land. Ahead of them, running across the plain, was a line in the grass which exactly matched the lane of rushing clouds in the sky. This line was nothing so obvious as a path . .
. but to the awakened eye, the way that everything bent in the same direction was as clear as a painted stripe.
The Path of the Beam. Somewhere ahead, where this Beam intersected all the others, stood the Dark Tower. Eddie thought that, if the wind were right, he would almost be able to smell its sullen stone.
And roses—the dusky scent of roses.
He took Susannah’s hand as she sat in her chair; Susannah took Roland’s; Roland took Jake’s. Oy stood two paces before them, head up, scenting the autumn air that combed his fur with unseen fingers, his gold-ringed eyes wide.
“We are ka-tet,” Eddie said. It crossed his mind to wonder at how much he’d changed; how he had become a stranger, even to himself. “We are one from many.”
“Ka-tet, ” Susannah said. “We are one from many.”
“One from many,” Jake said. “Come on, let’s go.”
Bird and bear and hare and fish, Eddie thought.
With Oy in the lead, they once more set out for the Dark Tower, walking along the Path of the Beam.
AFTERWORD
The scene in which Roland bests his old teacher, Cort, and goes off to roister in the less savory section of Gilead was written in the spring of 1970. The one in which Roland’s father shows up the following morning was written in the summer of 1996. Although only sixteen hours pass between the two occurrences in the world of the story, twenty-six years had passed in the life of the story’s teller. Yet the moment finally came, and I found myself confronting myself across a whore’s bed—the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard on one side, the successful popular novelist (“America’s shlockmeister,” as I am affectionately known by my legions of admiring critics) on the other.
I mention this only because it sums up the essential weirdness of the Dark Tower experience for me. I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland’s story is my Jupiter—a planet that dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there’s more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from ‘Salem ‘s Lot, who rode out of New England on a Greyhound Bus and wound up dwelling on the border of a terrible Mid-World land called Thunderclap. This seems to be where they all finish up, and why not? Mid-World was here first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland’s bombardier eyes.
This book has been too long in coming—a good many readers who enjoy Roland’s adventures have all but howled in frustration—and for that I apologize. The reason is best summed up by Susannah’s thought as she prepares to tell Blaine the first riddle of their contest: It is hard to begin. There’s nothing in these pages that I agree with more.