Dark Tower V, The Read online

  Susannah was looking at him reproachfully.

  “Okay, maybe not so funny,” Eddie said. “But we have to face the facts, hon. We’re nothing but a bunch of dirty-ass pilgrims currently camped out in some other reality—I mean, this isn’t even Mid-World anymore.”

  “Also,” Jake said apologetically, “we weren’t even really there, at least not the way you are when you go through one of the doors. They sensed us, but basically we were invisible.”

  “Let’s take one thing at a time,” Susannah said. “As far as money goes, I have plenty. If we could get at it, that is.”

  “How much?” Jake asked. “I know that’s sort of impolite—my mother’d faint if she heard me ask someone that, but—”

  “We’ve come a little bit too far to worry about being polite,” Susannah said. “Truth is, honey, I don’t exactly know. My dad invented a couple of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made the most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and handled the financial side mostly by himself until 1959.”

  “The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train,” Eddie said.

  She nodded. “That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father had a heart attack—the first of many. Some of it was probably stress over what happened to me, but I won’t own all of it. He was a hard driver, pure and simple.”

  “You don’t have to own any of it,” Eddie said. “I mean, it’s not as if you jumped in front of that subway car, Suze.”

  “I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth. With Mama gone, it was my job to take care of him and I couldn’t handle it—I could never completely get the idea that it was my fault out of my head.”

  “Gone days,” Roland said, and without much sympathy.

  “Thanks, sug,” Susannah said dryly. “You have such a way of puttin things in perspective. In any case, my Dad turned over the financial side of the company to his accountant after that first heart attack—an old friend named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop Mose took care of things for me. I’d guess that when Roland yanked me out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have been worth eight or ten million dollars. Would that be enough to buy Mr. Tower’s lot, always assuming he’d sell it to us?”

  “He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie’s right about the Beam,” Roland said. “I believe a deep part of Mr. Tower’s mind and spirit—the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the first place—has been waiting for us.”

  “Waiting for the cavalry,” Eddie said with a trace of a grin. “Like Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John Wayne movie.”

  Roland looked at him, unsmiling. “He’s been waiting for the White.”

  Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them. “Then I guess he isn’t waiting for me,” she said.

  “Yes,” Roland said, “he is.” And wondered, briefly, what color that other one was. Mia.

  “We need a door,” Jake said.

  “We need at least two,” Eddie said. “One to deal with Tower, sure. But before we can do that, we need one to go back to Susannah’s when. And I mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It’d be a bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo.”

  “Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone,” Jake said. “Funneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol.”

  Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under other circumstances. “Pop Mose’d never do such a thing! Why, he’s my godfather!”

  Jake looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain—and stuff like that happens in them all the time.”

  “Besides,” Eddie said, “big money can do weird things to people.”

  She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn’t, thought it a frog-squeezing look. “How would you know?” she asked. And then, almost at once, “Oh, sugar, I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for.”

  “It’s okay,” Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. “Heat of the moment.” He reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie’s face grew a little, started to look as if it belonged there.

  “It’s just that I know Moses Carver. He’s as honest as the day is long.”

  Eddie raised his hand—not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.

  “Let me see if I understand your idea,” Roland said. “First, it depends upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one point of when, but two.”

  There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded. “Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah’s been gone a couple of months, but nobody’s given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in, everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough, which might take a little time—”

  “The hard part’s apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it,” Susannah said. “When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip. And I’m pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years old.”

  “But legally it’s yours, right?” Eddie asked. Roland could see that he was still proceeding with some caution. Hadn’t quite got over that crack—How would you know?—just yet. And the look that had gone with it. “I mean, he can’t stop you from taking it, can he?”

  “No, honey,” she said. “My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five.” She turned her eyes—dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression—upon him. “There. You don’t need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can subtract, you can figure it out for yourself.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eddie said. “Time is a face on the water.”

  Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere—perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here—a rustie had just walked over his grave.

  Six

  “Has to be cash,” Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.

  “Huh?” Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.

  “Cash,” Jake repeated. “No one’d honor a check, even a cashier’s check, that was thirteen years old. Especially not one for millions of dollars.”

  “How do you know stuff like that, sug?” Susannah asked.

  Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn’t), he was Elmer Chambers’s son. Elmer Chambers wasn’t one of the world’s good guys—Roland would never call him part of the White—but he had been a master of what network execs called “the kill.” A Big Coffin Hunter in TV Land, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn’t forgotten the face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn’t so.

  “Cash, by all means cash,” Eddie said, breaking the silence. “A deal like this has to be cash. If there’s a check, we cash it in 1964, not 1977. Stick it in a gym-bag—did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977. Doesn’t have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close.”

  “And it can’t be after July fifteenth of ’77,” Jake put in.

  “God, no,” Eddie agreed. “We’d be all too likely to find Balazar’d persuaded Tower to sell, and there we’d be, bag of cash in one hand, thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of day.”

  There was a moment of silence—perhaps they were considering this lurid image—and then R
oland said, “You make it sound very easy, and why not? To you three, the concept of doorways between this world and your world of tack-sees and astin and fottergrafs seems almost as mundane as riding a mule would to me. Or strapping on a sixgun. And there’s good reason for you to feel that way. Each of you has been through one of these doors. Eddie has actually gone both ways—into this world and then back into his own.”

  “I gotta tell you that the return trip to New York wasn’t much fun,” Eddie said. “Too much gunplay.” Not to mention my brother’s severed head rolling across the floor of Balazar’s office.

  “Neither was getting through the door on Dutch Hill,” Jake added.

  Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own. “All my life I’ve accepted what you said the first time I knew you, Jake—what you said when you were dying.”

  Jake looked down, pale and without answer. He did not like to recall that (it was mercifully hazy in any case), and knew that Roland didn’t, either. Good! he thought. You shouldn’t want to remember! You let me drop! You let me die !

  “You said there were other worlds than these,” Roland said, “and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or—”

  “Or it’s another door,” Susannah murmured. “One that opens on the Dark Tower itself.”

  Roland nodded. “The idea has done more than cross my mind. In any case, the Manni know of these other worlds, and in some fashion have dedicated their lives to them. They believe todash to be the holiest of rites and most exalted of states. My father and his friends have long known of the glass balls; this I have told you. That the Wizard’s Rainbow, todash, and these magical doors may all be much the same is something we have guessed.”

  “Where you going with this, sug?” Susannah asked.

  “I’m simply reminding you that I have wandered long,” Roland said. “Because of changes in time—a softening of time which I know you all have felt—I’ve quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had no idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o’ the rainbow.”

  Roland looked at them earnestly.

  “You speak as though my world were as filled with magical doorways as yours is with…” He thought about it. “…with airplanes or stage-buses. That’s not so.”

  “Where we are now isn’t the same as anywhere you’ve been before, Roland,” Susannah said. She touched his deeply tanned wrist, her fingers gentle. “We’re not in your world anymore. You said so yourself, back in that version of Topeka where Blaine finally blew his top.”

  “Agreed,” Roland said. “I only want you to realize that such doors may be far more rare than you realize. And now you’re speaking not of one but two. Doors you can aim in time, the way you’d aim a gun.”

  I do not aim with my hand, Eddie thought, and shivered a little. “When you put it that way, Roland, it does sound a little iffy.”

  “Then what do we do next?” Jake asked.

  “I might be able to help you with that,” a voice said.

  They all turned, only Roland without surprise. He had heard the stranger when he arrived, about halfway through their palaver. Roland did turn with interest, however, and one look at the man standing twenty feet from them on the edge of the road was enough to tell him that the newcomer was either from the world of his new friends, or from one right next door.

  “Who are you?” Eddie asked.

  “Where are your friends?” Susannah asked.

  “Where are you from?” Jake asked. His eyes were alight with eagerness.

  The stranger wore a long black coat open over a dark shirt with a notched collar. His hair was long and white, sticking up on the sides and in front as if scared. His forehead was marked with a T-shaped scar. “My friends are still back there a little piece,” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the woods in a deliberately nonspecific way. “I now call Calla Bryn Sturgis my home. Before that, Detroit, Michigan, where I worked in a homeless shelter, making soup and running AA meetings. Work I knew quite well. Before that—for a short while—Topeka, Kansas.”

  He observed the way the three younger ones started at that with a kind of interested amusement.

  “Before that, New York City. And before that, a little town called Jerusalem’s Lot, in the state of Maine.”

  Seven

  “You’re from our side,” Eddie said. He spoke in a kind of sigh. “Holy God, you’re really from our side!”

  “Yes, I think I am,” the man in the turned-around collar said. “My name is Donald Callahan.”

  “You’re a priest,” Susannah said. She looked from the cross that hung around his neck—small and discreet, but gleaming gold—to the larger, cruder one that scarred his forehead.

  Callahan shook his head. “No more. Once. Perhaps one day again, with the blessing, but not now. Now I’m just a man of God. May I ask…when are you from?”

  “1964,” Susannah said.

  “1977,” Jake said.

  “1987,” Eddie said.

  Callahan’s eyes gleamed at that. “1987. And I came here in 1983, counting as we did then. So tell me something, young man, something very important. Had the Red Sox won the World Series yet when you left?”

  Eddie threw back his head and laughed. The sound was both surprised and cheerful. “No, man, sorry. They came within one out of it last year—at Shea Stadium this was, against the Mets—and then this guy named Bill Buckner who was playing first base let an easy grounder get through his wickets. He’ll never live it down. Come on over here and sit down, what do you say? There’s no coffee, but Roland—that’s this beat-up-lookin guy on my right—makes a pretty fair cup of woods tea.”

  Callahan turned his attention to Roland and then did an amazing thing: dropped to one knee, lowered his head slightly, and put his fist against his scarred brow. “Hile, gunslinger, may we be well-met on the path.”

  “Hile,” Roland said. “Come forward, good stranger, and tell us of your need.”

  Callahan looked up at him, surprised.

  Roland looked back at him calmly, and nodded. “Well-met or ill, it may be you will find what you seek.”

  “And you may also,” Callahan said.

  “Then come forward,” Roland said. “Come forward and join our palaver.”

  Eight

  “Before we really get going, can I ask you something?”

  This was Eddie. Beside him, Roland had built up the fire and was rummaging in their combined gunna for the little earthen pot—an artifact of the Old People—in which he liked to brew tea.

  “Of course, young man.”

  “You’re Donald Callahan.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your middle name?”

  Callahan cocked his head a little to the side, raised one eyebrow, then smiled. “Frank. After my grandfather. Does it signify?”

  Eddie, Susannah, and Jake shared a look. The thought that went with it flowed effortlessly among them: Donald Frank Callahan. Equals nineteen.

  “It does signify,” Callahan said.

  “Perhaps,” Roland said. “Perhaps not.” He poured water for the tea, manipulating the waterskin easily.

  “You seem to have suffered an accident,” Callahan said, looking at Roland’s right hand.

  “I make do,” Roland said.

  “Gets by with a little help from his friends, you might say,” Jake added, not smiling.

  Callahan nodded, not understanding and knowing he need not: they were ka-tet. He mig
ht not know that particular term, but the term didn’t matter. It was in the way they looked at each other and moved around each other.

  “You know my name,” Callahan said. “May I have the pleasure of knowing yours?”

  They introduced themselves: Eddie and Susannah Dean, of New York; Jake Chambers, of New York; Oy of Mid-World; Roland Deschain, of Gilead that was. Callahan nodded to each in turn, raising his closed fist to his forehead.

  “And to you comes Callahan, of the Lot,” he said when the introductions were done. “Or so I was. Now I guess I’m just the Old Fella. That’s what they call me in the Calla.”

  “Won’t your friends join us?” Roland said. “We haven’t a great deal to eat, but there’s always tea.”

  “Perhaps not just yet.”

  “Ah,” Roland said, and nodded as if he understood.

  “In any case, we’ve eaten well,” Callahan said. “It’s been a good year in the Calla—until now, anyway—and we’ll be happy to share what we have.” He paused, seemed to feel he had gone too far too fast, and added: “Mayhap. If all goes well.”

  “If,” Roland said. “An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long.”

  Callahan laughed. “Not bad! In any case, we’re probably better off for food than you are. We also have fresh muffin-balls—Zalia found em—but I suspect you know about those. She said the patch, although large, had a picked-over look.”

  “Jake found them,” Roland said.

  “Actually, it was Oy,” Jake said, and stroked the bumbler’s head. “I guess he’s sort of a muffin-hound.”

  “How long have you known we were here?” Callahan asked.

  “Two days.”

  Callahan contrived to look both amused and exasperated. “Since we cut your trail, in other words. And we tried to be so crafty.”

  “If you didn’t think you needed someone craftier than you are, you wouldn’t have come,” Roland said.

  Callahan sighed. “You say true, I say thankya.”

  “Do you come for aid and succor?” Roland asked. There was only mild curiosity in his voice, but Eddie Dean felt a deep, deep chill. The words seemed to hang there, full of resonance. Nor was he alone in feeling that. Susannah took his right hand. A moment later Jake’s hand crept into Eddie’s left.