The Dark Tower VII Read online

  Also by Stephen King

  NOVELS

  Carrie

  ’Salem’s Lot

  The Shining

  The Stand

  The Dead Zone

  Firestarter

  Cujo

  THE DARK TOWER I:

  The Gunslinger

  Christine

  Pet Sematary

  Cycle of the Werewolf

  The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

  It

  The Eyes of the Dragon

  Misery

  The Tommyknockers

  THE DARK TOWER II:

  The Drawing of the Three

  THE DARK TOWER III:

  The Waste Lands

  The Dark Half

  Needful Things

  Gerald’s Game

  Dolores Claiborne

  Insomnia

  Rose Madder

  Desperation

  The Green Mile

  THE DARK TOWER IV:

  Wizard and Glass

  Bag of Bones

  The Girl Who Loved

  Tom Gordon

  Dreamcatcher

  Black House (with Peter Straub)

  From a Buick 8

  THE DARK TOWER V:

  Wolves of the Calla

  THE DARK TOWER VI:

  Song of Susannah

  AS RICHARD BACHMAN

  Rage

  The Long Walk

  Roadwork

  The Running Man

  Thinner

  The Regulators

  COLLECTIONS

  Night Shift

  Different Seasons

  Skeleton Crew

  Four Past Midnight

  Nightmares and Dreamscapes

  Hearts in Atlantis

  Everything’s Eventual

  SCREENPLAYS

  Creepshow

  Cat’s Eye

  Silver Bullet

  Maximum Overdrive

  Pet Sematary

  Golden Years

  Sleepwalkers

  The Stand

  The Shining

  Rose Red

  Storm of the Century

  NONFICTION

  Danse Macabre

  On Writing

  Dark Tower–related in bold

  THE DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWER

  Copyright © 2004 by Stephen King

  http://WWW.STEPHENKING.COM

  Illustrations © 2004 by Michael Whelan

  http://WWW.GLASSONIONGRAPHICS.COM

  Book design by Thomas Canty and Robert K. Wiener

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Maps © 2004 by Robin Furth

  “BAD COMPANY,” by Paul Bernard Rodgers, Simon F. Kirke © 1974 (renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. and BADCO MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014

  Lyric excerpt from “Hurt” written by Trent Reznor, copyright 1994 Leaving Hope Music/TVT Music, Inc. Administered by Leaving Hope Music, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT” by George David Weiss, Luigi Creatore, and Hugo Peretti © 1961, Renewed Abilene Music, Inc. Permission secured. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2004109365

  ISBN 0-7432-6679-X

  FIRST TRADE EDITION

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  DONALD M. GRANT, PUBLISHER, INC.

  Post Office Box 187, Hampton Falls, NH 03844

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

  Therefore, Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark Tower cycle

  is dedicated to you.

  Long days and pleasant nights.

  Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled

  Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears

  Of all the lost adventurers, my peers—

  How such a one was strong, and such was bold,

  And such was fortunate, yet each of old

  Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

  There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

  To view the last of me, a living frame

  For one more picture! In a sheet of flame

  I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

  Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

  And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

  —Robert Browning “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

  I was born

  Six-gun in my hand,

  behind a gun

  I’ll make my final stand.

  —Bad Company

  What have I become?

  My sweetest friend

  Everyone I know

  Goes away in the end

  You could have it all

  My empire of dirt

  I will let you down

  I will make you hurt

  —Trent Reznor

  Contents

  Part One:

  The Little Red King

  Dan-Tete

  I: Callahan and the Vampires

  II: Lifted on the Wave

  III: Eddie Makes a Call

  IV: Dan-Tete

  V: In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

  VI: On Turtleback Lane

  VII: Reunion

  Part Two:

  Blue Heaven

  Devar-Toi

  I: The Devar-Tete

  II: The Watcher

  III: The Shining Wire

  IV: The Door into Thunderclap

  V: Steek-Tete

  VI: The Master of Blue Heaven

  VII: Ka-Shume

  VIII: Notes from the Gingerbread House

  IX: Tracks on the Path

  X: The Last Palaver (Sheemie’s Dream)

  XI: The Attack on Algul Siento

  XII: The Tet Breaks

  Part Three:

  In This Haze of Green and Gold

  Ves’-Ka Gan

  I: Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South

  II: Ves’-Ka Gan

  III: New York Again (Roland Shows ID)

  IV: Fedic (Two Views)

  Part Four:

  The White Lands of Empathica

  Dandelo

  I: The Thing Under the Castle

  II: On Badlands Avenue

  III: The Castle of the Crimson King

  IV: Hides

  V: Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane

  VI: Patrick Danville

  Part Five:

  The Scarlet Field of Can’-Ka No Rey

  I: The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear)

  II: Mordred

  III: The Crimson King and the Dark Tower

  Epilogue

  Susannah in New York

  Coda

  Found

  Appendix

  Robert Browning “Childe Roland to The Dark Tower Came”

  Author’s Note

  Illustrations

  “…THE WHITE COMMANDS YOU!”

  “COME ON THEN, YOU BASTARDS.”

  “…WILL YOU?”

  HE REACHED FOR IT AGAIN…

  BELOW THEM IN THE SEEPING LIGHT WAS THE VILLAGE.

  HE MOVED IN BETWEEN JAKE AND EDDIE.

  …THE PLACE WHERE ROLAND FINALLY STOPPED FELT MORE LIKE A CHURCH THAN A CLEARING.


  …HE SAT ON HIS THRONE—…WHICH IS MADE OF SKULLS

  …WOE TO WHOEVER HAPPENED TO BE IN HIS PATH.

  IT WOULD NEVER OPEN AGAIN…

  …HIS FACE WENT SLACK WITH A PECULIAR SORT OF ECSTACY…

  THE DARK TOWER

  Chapter I:

  Callahan and the Vampires

  One

  Pere Don Callahan had once been the Catholic priest of a town, ’Salem’s Lot had been its name, that no longer existed on any map. He didn’t much care. Concepts such as reality had ceased to matter to him.

  This onetime priest now held a heathen object in his hand, a scrimshaw turtle made of ivory. There was a nick in its beak and a scratch in the shape of a question mark on its back, but otherwise it was a beautiful thing.

  Beautiful and powerful. He could feel the power in his hand like volts.

  “How lovely it is,” he whispered to the boy who stood with him. “Is it the Turtle Maturin? It is, isn’t it?”

  The boy was Jake Chambers, and he’d come a long loop in order to return almost to his starting-place here in Manhattan. “I don’t know,” he said. “She calls it the sköldpadda, and it may help us, but it can’t kill the harriers that are waiting for us in there.” He nodded toward the Dixie Pig, wondering if he meant Susannah or Mia when he used that all-purpose feminine pronoun she. Once he would have said it didn’t matter because the two women were so tightly wound together. Now, however, he thought it did matter, or would soon.

  “Will you?” Jake asked the Pere, meaning Will you stand. Will you fight. Will you kill.

  “Oh yes,” Callahan said calmly. He put the ivory turtle with its wise eyes and scratched back into his breast pocket with the extra shells for the gun he carried, then patted the cunningly made thing once to make sure it rode safely. “I’ll shoot until the bullets are gone, and if I run out of bullets before they kill me, I’ll club them with the…the gun-butt.”

  The pause was so slight Jake didn’t even notice it. But in that pause, the White spoke to Father Callahan. It was a force he knew of old, even in boyhood, although there had been a few years of bad faith along the way, years when his understanding of that elemental force had first grown dim and then become lost completely. But those days were gone, the White was his again, and he told God thankya.

  Jake was nodding, saying something Callahan barely heard. And what Jake said didn’t matter. What that other voice said—the voice of something

  (Gan)

  perhaps too great to be called God—did.

  The boy must go on, the voice told him. Whatever happens here, however it falls, the boy must go on. Your part in the story is almost done. His is not.

  They walked past a sign on a chrome post (CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION), Jake’s special friend Oy trotting between them, his head up and his muzzle wreathed in its usual toothy grin. At the top of the steps, Jake reached into the woven sack Susannah-Mio had brought out of Calla Bryn Sturgis and grabbed two of the plates—the ’Rizas. He tapped them together, nodded at the dull ringing sound, and then said: “Let’s see yours.”

  Callahan lifted the Ruger Jake had brought out of Calla New York, and now back into it; life is a wheel and we all say thankya. For a moment the Pere held the Ruger’s barrel beside his right cheek like a duelist. Then he touched his breast pocket, bulging with shells, and with the turtle. The sköldpadda.

  Jake nodded. “Once we’re in, we stay together. Always together, with Oy between. On three. And once we start, we never stop.”

  “Never stop.”

  “Right. Are you ready?”

  “Yes. God’s love on you, boy.”

  “And on you, Pere. One…two…three.” Jake opened the door and together they went into the dim light and the sweet tangy smell of roasting meat.

  Two

  Jake went to what he was sure would be his death remembering two things Roland Deschain, his true father, had said. Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years. And You needn’t die happy when your day comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served.

  Jake Chambers surveyed the Dixie Pig with a satisfied mind.

  Three

  Also with crystal clarity. His senses were so heightened that he could smell not just roasting flesh but the rosemary with which it had been rubbed; could hear not only the calm rhythm of his breath but the tidal murmur of his blood climbing brainward on one side of his neck and descending heartward on the other.

  He also remembered Roland’s saying that even the shortest battle, from first shot to final falling body, seemed long to those taking part. Time grew elastic; stretched to the point of vanishment. Jake had nodded as if he understood, although he hadn’t.

  Now he did.

  His first thought was that there were too many of them—far, far too many. He put their number at close to a hundred, the majority certainly of the sort Pere Callahan had referred to as “low men.” (Some were low women, but Jake had no doubt the principle was the same.) Scattered among them, all less fleshy than the low folken and some as slender as fencing weapons, their complexions ashy and their bodies surrounded in dim blue auras, were what had to be vampires.

  Oy stood at Jake’s heel, his small, foxy face stern, whining low in his throat.

  That smell of cooking meat wafting through the air was not pork.

  Four

  Ten feet between us any time we have ten feet to give, Pere—so Jake had said out on the sidewalk, and even as they approached the maître d’s platform, Callahan was drifting to Jake’s right, putting the required distance between them.

  Jake had also told him to scream as loud as he could for as long as he could, and Callahan was opening his mouth to begin doing just that when the voice of the White spoke up inside again. Only one word, but it was enough.

  Sköldpadda, it said.

  Callahan was still holding the Ruger up by his right cheek. Now he dipped into his breast pocket with his left hand. His awareness of the scene before him wasn’t as hyper-alert as his young companion’s, but he saw a great deal: the orangey-crimson electric flambeaux on the walls, the candles on each table immured in glass containers of a brighter, Halloweenish orange, the gleaming napkins. To the left of the dining room was a tapestry showing knights and their ladies sitting at a long banquet table. There was a sense in here—Callahan wasn’t sure exactly what provoked it, the various tells and stimuli were too subtle—of people just resettling themselves after some bit of excitement: a small kitchen fire, say, or an automobile accident on the street.

  Or a lady having a baby, Callahan thought as he closed his hand on the Turtle. That’s always good for a little pause between the appetizer and the entrée.

  “Now come Gilead’s ka-mais!” shouted an excited, nervous voice. Not a human one, of that Callahan was almost positive. It was too buzzy to be human. Callahan saw what appeared to be some sort of monstrous bird-human hybrid standing at the far end of the room. It wore straight-leg jeans and a plain white shirt, but the head rising from that shirt was painted with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes looked like drops of liquid tar.

  “Get them!” this horridly ridiculous thing shouted, and brushed aside a napkin. Beneath it was some sort of weapon. Callahan supposed it was a gun, but it looked like the sort you saw on Star Trek. What did they call them? Phasers? Stunners?

  It didn’t matter. Callahan had a far better weapon, and wanted to make sure they all saw it. He swept the place-settings and the glass container with the candle in it from the nearest table, then snatched away the tablecloth like a magician doing a trick. The last thing he wanted to do was to trip over a swatch of linen at the crucial moment. Then, with a nimbleness he wouldn’t have believed even a week ago, he stepped onto one of the chairs and from the chair to the table-top. Once on the table, he lifted the sköldpadda with his fingers supporting the turtle’s flat undershell, giving them all a good look at it.

  I could croon som
ething, he thought. Maybe “Moonlight Becomes You” or “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  At that point they had been inside the Dixie Pig for exactly thirty-four seconds.

  Five

  High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here. When they passed the maître d’s stand (Blackmail Central, his Dad liked to call such stations), the smell of the Dixie Pig’s diners had been faint, the smell of people coming back to normal after some sort of dust-up. But when the bird-creature in the far corner shouted, Jake had smelled the patrons more strongly. It was a metallic aroma, enough like blood to incite his temper and his emotions. Yes, he saw Tweety Bird knock aside the napkin on his table; yes, he saw the weapon beneath; yes, he understood that Callahan, standing on the table, was an easy shot. That was of far less concern to Jake than the mobilizing weapon that was Tweety Bird’s mouth. Jake was drawing back his right arm, meaning to fling the first of his nineteen plates and amputate the head in which that mouth resided, when Callahan raised the turtle.