Gasher lowered the ‘dozer’s blade. It tore across the lot on a diagonal, smashing
brick, pulverizing beer and soda bottles to glittering powder, striking sparks from the rocks. Directly in its path, the rose nodded its delicate head.
“Let’s see you ask some of yer silly questions now!” this unwelcome apparition cried. “Ask all yer wants, my dear little culls, why not? Wery fond of riddles is yer old pal Gasher! Just so you understand that, no matter what yer ask, I’m gointer run that nasty thing over, mash it flat, aye, so I will! Then back over it I’ll go! Root and branch, my dear little culls! Aye, root and branch!”
Susannah shrieked as the scarlet bulldozer blade bore down on the rose, and Eddie grabbed for the fence. He would vault over it, throw himself on the rose, try to protect it…
… except it was too late. And he knew it.
He looked back up at the cackling thing in the bulldozer’s peak-seat and saw that Gasher was gone. Now the man at the controls was Engineer Bob, from Charlie the Choo-Choo.
“Stop!” Eddie screamed. “For Christ’s sake, stop!”
“I can’t, Eddie. The world has moved on, and I can’t stop. I must move on with it. ”
And as the shadow of the ‘dozer fell over the rose, as the blade tore through one of the posts holding up the sign (Eddie saw coming soon had changed to coming now), he realized that the man at the controls wasn’t Engineer Bob, either.
It was Roland.
10
Eddie sat up in the breakdown lane of the turnpike, gasping breath he could see in the air and with sweat already chilling on his hot skin. He was sure he had screamed, must have screamed, but Susannah still slept beside him with only the top of her head poking out of the bedroll they shared, and Jake was snoring softly off to the left, one arm out of his own blankets and curled around Oy. The bumbler was also sleeping.
Roland wasn’t. Roland sat calmly on the far side of the dead campfire, cleaning his guns by starlight and looking at Eddie.
“Bad dreams.” Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“A visit from your brother?”
Eddie shook his head.
“The Tower, then? The field of roses and the Tower?” Roland’s face remained impassive, but Eddie could hear the subtle eagerness which always came into his voice when the subject was the Dark Tower. Eddie had once called the gunslinger a Tower junkie, and Roland hadn’t denied it.
“Not this time.”
“What, then?”
Eddie shivered. “Cold.”
“Yes. Thank your gods there’s no rain, at least. Autumn rain’s an evil to be avoided whenever one may. What was your dream?”
Still Eddie hesitated. “You’d never betray us, would you, Roland?”
“No man can say that for sure, Eddie, and I have already played the betrayer more than once. To my shame. But … I think those days are over. We are one, ka-tet. If I betray any one of you—even Jake’s furry friend, perhaps—I betray myself. Why do you ask?”
“And you’d never betray your quest.”
“Renounce the Tower? No, Eddie. Not that, not ever. Tell me your dream.”
Eddie did, omitting nothing. When he had finished, Roland looked down at his guns, frowning. They seemed to have reassembled themselves while Eddie was talking.
“So what does it mean, that I saw you driving that ‘dozer at the end? That I still don’t trust you? That subconsciously—”
“Is this ology-of-the-psyche? The cabala I have heard you and Susannah speak of?”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“It’s shit,” Roland said dismissively. “Mudpies of the mind. Dreams either mean nothing or everything—and when they mean everything, they almost always come as messages from . . . well, from other levels of the Tower.” He gazed at Eddie shrewdly. “And not all messages are sent by friends.”
“Something or someone is fucking with my head? Is that what you mean?”
“I think it possible. But you must watch me all the same. I bear watching, as you well know.”
“I trust you,” Eddie said, and the very awkwardness with which he spoke lent his words sincerity. Roland looked touched, almost shaken, and Eddie wondered how
he ever could have thought this man an emotionless robot. Roland might be a little short on imagination, but he had feelings, all right.
“One thing about your dream concerns me very much, Eddie.”
“The bulldozer?”
“The machine, yes. The threat to the rose.”
“Jake saw the rose, Roland. It was fine.”
Roland nodded. “In his when, the when of that particular day, the rose was thriving. But that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so. If the construction the sign spoke of comes . . . if the bulldozer comes …”
“There are other worlds than these,” Eddie said. “Remember?”
“Some things may exist only in one. In one where, in one when.” Roland lay down and looked up at the stars. “We must protect that rose,” he said. “We must protect it at all costs.”
“You think it’s another door, don’t you? One that opens on the Dark Tower.”
The gunslinger looked at him from eyes that ran with starshine. “I think it may be the Tower,” he said. “And if it’s destroyed—”
His eyes closed. He said no more.
Eddie lay awake late.
11
The new day dawned clear and bright and cold. In the strong morning sunlight, the thing Eddie had spotted the evening before was more clearly visible .. . but he still couldn’t tell what it was. Another riddle, and he was getting damned sick of them.
He stood squinting at it, shading his eyes from the sun, with Susannah on one side of him and Jake on the other. Roland was back by the camp-fire, packing what he called their gunna, a word which seemed to mean all their worldly goods. He appeared not to be concerned with the thing up ahead, or to know what it was.
How far away? Thirty miles? Fifty? The answer seemed to depend on how far could you see in all this flat land, and Eddie didn’t know the answer. One thing he felt quite sure of was that Jake had been right on at least two counts—it was some kind of building, and it sprawled across all four lanes of the highway. It must; how else could they see it? It would have been lost in the thinny … wouldn’t it?
Maybe it’s standing in one of those open patches—what Suze calls “the holes in
the clouds.” Or maybe the thinny ends before we get that far. Or maybe it’s a goddam hallucination. In any case, you might as well put it out of your mind for the time being. Got a little more turnpikin’ to do.
Still, the building held him. It looked like an airy Arabian Nights confection of blue and gold . . . except Eddie had an idea that the blue was stolen from the sky and the gold from the newly risen sun.
“Roland, come here a second!”
At first he didn’t think the gunslinger would, but then Roland cinched a rawhide lace on Susannah’s pack, rose, put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, and walked over to them.
“Gods, one would think no one in this band has the wit to housekeep but me,”
Roland said.
“We’ll pitch in,” Eddie said, “we always do, don’t we? But look at that thing first.”
Roland did, but only with a quick glance, as if he did not even want to acknowledge it.
“It’s glass, isn’t it?” Eddie asked.
Roland took another brief look. “I wot,” he said, a phrase which seemed to mean Reckon so, partner.
“We’ve got lots of glass buildings where I come from, but most of them are office buildings. That thing up ahead looks more like something from Disney World. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you want to look at it?” Susannah asked.
Roland did take another look at the distant blaze of light on glass, but once again it was quick—little more than a peek.
“Because it’s trouble,” Roland said, “and it’s in our road. We’ll get there in time.
No need to live in trouble until trouble comes.”
“Will we get there today?” Jake asked.
Roland shrugged, his face still closed. “There’ll be water if God wills it,” he said.
“Christ, you could have made a fortune writing fortune cookies,” Eddie said. He hoped for a smile, at least, but got none. Roland simply walked back across the road, dropped to one knee, shouldered his purse and his pack, and waited for the others. When they were ready, the pilgrims resumed their walk east along Interstate 70. The gunslinger led, walking with his head down and his eyes on the
toes of his boots.
12
Roland was quiet all day, and as the building ahead of them neared (trouble, and in our road, he had said), Susannah came to realize it wasn’t grumpiness they were seeing, or worry about anything which lay any farther ahead of them than tonight.