Dark Tower V, The Read online

  “Huh!” Susannah said. “The very same bad boys! It’s almost like a Dickens novel.”

  “Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?” Roland asked.

  “A novel’s a long story set down in a book,” she said. “Dickens wrote about a dozen. He was maybe the best who ever lived. In his stories, folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from other places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way that always happened. He said Dickens’s stories were full of easy coincidences.”

  “A teacher who either didn’t know about ka or didn’t believe in it,” Roland said.

  Eddie was nodding. “Yeah, this is ka, all right. No doubt.”

  “I’m more interested in the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo than this storyteller Dickens,” Roland said. “Jake, I wonder if you’d—”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” Jake said, unbuckling the straps of his pack. Almost reverently, he slid out the battered book telling the adventures of Charlie the locomotive and his friend, Engineer Bob. They all looked at the cover. The name below the picture was still Beryl Evans.

  “Man,” Eddie said. “That is so weird. I mean, I don’t want to get sidetracked, or anything…” He paused, realizing he had just made a railroading pun, then went on. Roland wasn’t very interested in puns and jokes, anyway. “…but that is weird. The one Jake bought—Jake Seventy-seven—was by Claudia something Bachman.”

  “Inez,” Jake said. “Also, there was a y. A lowercase y. Any of you know what that means?”

  None of them did, but Roland said there had been names like it in Mejis. “I believe it was some sort of added honorific. And I’m not sure it is to the side. Jake, you said the sign in the window was different from before. How?”

  “I can’t remember. But you know what? I think if you hypnotized me again—you know, with the bullet—I could.”

  “And in time I may,” Roland said, “but this morning time is short.”

  Back to that again, Eddie thought. Yesterday it hardly existed, and now it’s short. But it’s all about time, somehow, isn’t it? Roland’s old days, our old days, and these new days. These dangerous new days.

  “Why?” Susannah asked.

  “Our friends,” Roland said, and nodded to the south. “I have a feeling they’ll be making themselves known to us soon.”

  “Are they our friends?” Jake asked.

  “That really is to the side,” Roland said, and again wondered if that were really true. “For now, let’s turn the mind of our khef to this Bookstore of the Mind, or whatever it’s called. You saw the harriers from the Leaning Tower greensticking the owner, didn’t you? This man Tower, or Toren.”

  “Pressuring him, you mean?” Eddie asked. “Twisting his arm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure they were,” Jake said.

  “Were,” Oy put in. “Sure were.”

  “Bet you anything that Tower and Toren are really the same name,” Susannah said. “That toren’s Dutch for ‘tower.’ ” She saw Roland getting ready to speak, and held up her hand. “It’s the way folks often do things in our bit of the universe, Roland—change the foreign name to one that’s more…well…American.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “So Stempowicz becomes Stamper…Yakov becomes Jacob…or…”

  “Or Beryl Evans becomes Claudia y Inez Bachman,” Jake said. He laughed but didn’t sound very amused.

  Eddie picked a half-burned stick out of the fire and began to doodle with it in the dirt. One by one the Great Letters formed: C…L…A…U. “Big Nose even said Tower was Dutch. ‘A squarehead’s always a squarehead, right, boss?’ ” He looked at Jake for confirmation. Jake nodded, then took the stick and continued on with it: D…I…A.

  “Him being Dutch makes a lot of sense, you know,” Susannah said. “At one time, the Dutch owned most of Manhattan.”

  “You want another Dickens touch?” Jake asked. He wrote y in the dirt after CLAUDIA, then looked up at Susannah. “How about the haunted house where I came through into this world?”

  “The Mansion,” Eddie said.

  “The Mansion in Dutch Hill,” Jake said.

  “Dutch Hill. Yeah, that’s right. Goddam.”

  “Let’s go to the core,” Roland said. “I think it’s the agreement paper you saw. And you felt you had to see it, didn’t you?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Did your need feel like a part of following the Beam?”

  “Roland, I think it was the Beam.”

  “The way to the Tower, in other words.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. He was thinking about the way clouds flowed along the Beam, the way shadows bent along the Beam, the way every twig of every tree seemed to turn in its direction. All things serve the Beam, Roland had told them, and Eddie’s need to see the paper Balazar had put in front of Calvin Tower had felt like a need, harsh and imperative.

  “Tell me what it said.”

  Eddie bit his lip. He didn’t feel as scared about this as he had about carving the key which had ultimately allowed them to rescue Jake and pull him through to this side, but it was close. Because, like the key, this was important. If he forgot something, worlds might crash.

  “Man, I can’t remember it all, not word for word—”

  Roland made an impatient gesture. “If I need that, I’ll hypnotize you and get it word for word.”

  “Do you think it matters?” Susannah asked.

  “I think it all matters,” Roland said.

  “What if hypnosis doesn’t work on me?” Eddie asked. “What if I’m not, like, a good subject?”

  “Leave that to me,” Roland said.

  “Nineteen,” Jake said abruptly. They all turned toward him. He was looking at the letters he and Eddie had drawn in the dirt beside the dead campfire. “Claudia y Inez Bachman. Nineteen letters.”

  Three

  Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number nineteen was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.

  “The paper,” he said. “Let’s stay with that for now. Tell me everything about it you can remember.”

  “Well, it was a legal agreement, with the seal at the bottom and everything.” Eddie paused, struck by a fairly basic question. Roland probably got this part of it—he’d been a kind of law enforcement officer, after all—but it wouldn’t hurt to be sure. “You know about lawyers, don’t you?”

  Roland spoke in his driest tone. “You forget that I came from Gilead, Eddie. The most inner of the Inner Baronies. We had more merchants and farmers and manufactors than lawyers, I think, but the count would have been close.”

  Susannah laughed. “You make me think of a scene from Shakespeare, Roland. Two characters—might have been Falstaff and Prince Hal, I’m not sure—are talkin about what they’re gonna do when they win the war and take over. And one of em says, ‘First we’ll kill all the lawyers.’ ”

  “It would be a fairish way to start,” Roland said, and Eddie found his thoughtful tone rather chilling. Then the gunslinger turned to him again. “Go on. If you can add anything, Jake, please do. And relax, both of you, for your fathers’ sakes. For now I only want a sketch.”

  Eddie supposed he’d known that, but hearing Roland say it made him feel better. “All right. It was a Memorandum of Agreement. That was right at the top, in big letters. At the bottom it said Agreed to, and there were two signatures. One was Calvin Tower. The other was Richard someone. Do you remember, Jake?”

  “Sayre,” Jake said. “Richard Patrick Sayre.” He paused briefly, lips moving, then nodded. “Nineteen letters.”

  “And what did it say, this agreement?” Roland asked.

  “Not all that much, if you want to know the truth,” Eddie said. “Or that’s what it seemed like to me, anyway. Basically it said that Tower owned a vacant lot on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Second Avenue—”

  “The v
acant lot,” Jake said. “The one with the rose in it.”

  “Yeah, that one. Anyway, Tower signed this agreement on July 15th, 1976. Sombra Corporation gave him a hundred grand. What he gave them, so far as I could tell, was a promise not to sell the lot to anyone but Sombra for the next year, to take care of it—pay the taxes and such—and then to give Sombra first right of purchase, assuming he hasn’t sold it to them by then, anyway. Which he hadn’t when we were there, but the agreement still had a month and a half to run.”

  “Mr. Tower said the hundred thousand was all spent,” Jake put in.

  “Was there anything in the agreement about this Sombra Corporation having a topping privilege?” Susannah asked.

  Eddie and Jake thought it over, exchanged a glance, then shook their heads.

  “Sure?” Susannah asked.

  “Not quite, but pretty sure,” Eddie said. “You think it matters?”

  “I don’t know,” Susannah said. “The kind of agreement you’re talking about…well, without a topping privilege, it just doesn’t seem to make sense. What does it boil down to, when you stop to think about it? ‘I, Calvin Tower, agree to think about selling you my vacant lot. You pay me a hundred thousand dollars and I’ll think about it for a whole year. When I’m not drinking coffee and playing chess with my friends, that is. And when the year’s up, maybe I’ll sell it to you and maybe I’ll keep it and maybe I’ll just auction it off to the highest bidder. And if you don’t like it, sweetcheeks, you just go spit.’ ”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Roland said mildly.

  “What?” Susannah asked.

  “This Sombra is no ordinary law-abiding combination. Ask yourself if an ordinary law-abiding combination would hire someone like Balazar to carry their messages.”

  “You have a point,” Eddie said. “Tower was mucho scared.”

  “Anyway,” Jake said, “it makes at least a few things clearer. The sign I saw in the vacant lot, for instance. This Sombra Company also got the right to ‘advertise forthcoming projects’ there for their hundred thousand. Did you see that part, Eddie?”

  “I think so. Right after the part about Tower not permitting any liens or encumbrances on his property, because of Sombra’s ‘stated interest,’ wasn’t it?”

  “Right,” Jake said. “The sign I saw in the lot said…” He paused, thinking, then raised his hands and looked between them, as if reading a sign only he could see: “MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN. And then, COMING SOON, TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS.”

  “So that’s what they want it for,” Eddie said. “Condos. But—”

  “What are condominiums?” Susannah asked, frowning. “It sounds like some newfangled kind of spice rack.”

  “It’s a kind of co-op apartment deal,” Eddie said. “They probably had em in your when, but by a different name.”

  “Yeah,” Susannah said with some asperity. “We called em coops. Or sometimes we went way downtown and called em apartment buildings.”

  “It doesn’t matter because it was never about condos,” Jake said. “Never about the building the sign said they were going to put there, for that matter. All that’s only, you know…shoot, what’s the word?”

  “Camouflage?” Roland suggested.

  Jake grinned. “Camouflage, yeah. It’s about the rose, not the building! And they can’t get at it until they own the ground it grows on. I’m sure of it.”

  “You may be right about the building’s not meaning anything,” Susannah said, “but that Turtle Bay name has a certain resonance, wouldn’t you say?” She looked at the gunslinger. “That part of Manhattan is called Turtle Bay, Roland.”

  He nodded, unsurprised. The Turtle was one of the twelve Guardians, and almost certainly stood at the far end of the Beam upon which they now traveled.

  “The people from Mills Construction might not know about the rose,” Jake said, “but I bet the ones from Sombra Corporation do.” His hand stole into Oy’s fur, which was thick enough at the billy-bumbler’s neck to make his fingers disappear entirely. “I think that somewhere in New York City—in some business building, probably in Turtle Bay on the East Side—there’s a door marked SOMBRA CORPORATION. And someplace behind that door there’s another door. The kind that takes you here.”

  For a minute they sat thinking about it—about worlds spinning on a single axle in dying harmony—and no one said anything.

  Four

  “Here’s what I think is happening,” Eddie said. “Suze, Jake, feel free to step in if you think I’m getting it wrong. This guy Cal Tower’s some sort of custodian for the rose. He may not know it on a conscious level, but he must be. Him and maybe his whole family before him. It explains the name.”

  “Only he’s the last,” Jake said.

  “You can’t be sure of that, hon,” Susannah said.

  “No wedding ring,” Jake responded, and Susannah nodded, giving him that one, at least provisionally.

  “Maybe at one time there were lots of Torens owning lots of New York property,” Eddie said, “but those days are gone. Now the only thing standing between the Sombra Corporation and the rose is one nearly broke fat guy who changed his name. He’s a…what do you call someone who loves books?”

  “A bibliophile,” Susannah said.

  “Yeah, one of those. And George Biondi may not be Einstein, but he said at least one smart thing while we were eavesdropping. He said Tower’s place wasn’t a real shop but just a hole you poured money into. What’s going on with him is a pretty old story where we come from, Roland. When my Ma used to see some rich guy on TV—Donald Trump, for instance—”

  “Who?” Susannah asked.

  “You don’t know him, he would’ve been just a kid back in ’64. And it doesn’t matter. ‘Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,’ my mother would tell us. ‘It’s the American way, boys.’

  “So here’s Tower, and he’s sort of like Roland—the last of his line. He sells off a piece of property here and a piece there, making his taxes, making his house payments, keeping up with the credit cards and the doctor bills, paying for his stock. And yeah, I’m making this up…except somehow it doesn’t feel that way.”

  “No,” Jake said. He spoke in a low, fascinated voice. “It doesn’t.”

  “Perhaps you shared his khef,” Roland said. “More likely, you touched him. As my old friend Alain used to. Go on, Eddie.”

  “And every year he tells himself the bookstore’ll turn around. Catch on, maybe, the way things in New York sometimes do. Get out of the red and into the black and then he’ll be okay. And finally there’s only one thing left to sell: lot two-ninety-eight on Block Nineteen in Turtle Bay.”

  “Two-nine-eight adds up to nineteen,” Susannah said. “I wish I could decide if that means something or if it’s just Blue Car Syndrome.”

  “What’s Blue Car Syndrome?” Jake asked.

  “When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere.”

  “Not here, you don’t,” Jake said.

  “Not here,” Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes whole weeks would go by, and Oy would do nothing but give out the occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might almost have been the product of original thought. But you didn’t know. Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure.

  The way we don’t know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable wink.

  “He holds onto that lot until the bitter end,” Eddie said. “I mean hey, he doesn’t even own the crappy building his bookstore’s in, he only leases it.”

  Jake took over. “Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli goes out of business, and Tower has it torn down. Because part of him wants to sell the lot. That part of him says he’d be crazy not to.” Jake fell silent for a moment, thinking about how some thoughts came in the middle of the night. Cr
azy thoughts, crazy ideas, and voices that wouldn’t shut up. “But there’s another part of him, another voice—”

  “The voice of the Turtle,” Susannah put in quietly.

  “Yes, the Turtle or the Beam,” Jake agreed. “They’re probably the same thing. And this voice tells him he has to hold onto it at all costs.” He looked at Eddie. “Do you think he knows about the rose? Do you think he goes down there sometimes and looks at it?”

  “Does a rabbit shit in the woods?” Eddie responded. “Sure he goes. And sure he knows. On some level he must know. Because a corner lot in Manhattan…how much would a thing like that be worth, Susannah?”

  “In my time, probably a million bucks,” she said. “By 1977, God knows. Three? Five?” She shrugged. “Enough to let sai Tower go on selling books at a loss for the rest of his life, provided he was reasonably careful about how he invested the principal.”

  Eddie said, “Everything about this shows how reluctant he is to sell. I mean Suze already pointed out how little Sombra got for their hundred grand.”

  “But they did get something,” Roland said. “Something very important.”

  “A foot in the door,” Eddie said.

  “You say true. And now, as the term of their agreement winds down, they send your world’s version of the Big Coffin Hunters. Hard-caliber boys. If greed or necessity doesn’t compel Tower to sell them the land with the rose on it, they’ll terrify him into it.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. And who would stand on Tower’s side? Maybe Aaron Deepneau. Maybe no one. “So what do we do?”

  “Buy it ourselves,” Susannah said promptly. “Of course.”

  Five

  There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Eddie nodded thoughtfully. “Sure, why not? The Sombra Corporation doesn’t have a topping privilege in their little agreement—they probably tried, but Tower wouldn’t go for it. So sure, we’ll buy it. How many deerskins do you think he’ll want? Forty? Fifty? If he’s a real hard bargainer, maybe we can throw in some relics from the Old People. You know, cups and plates and arrowheads. They’d be conversation pieces at cocktail parties.”