The Dark Tower VII Read online

  “I know that. It’s on your face, son. Like a scar.”

  Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed.

  “But why would you do this?” Eddie asked. “I have to know that. Why would you take all this on for two men you just met?”

  John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and would wear until his death in the year of 1989—the cross given to Roland by an old woman in a forgotten town. He would touch it just that way in the years ahead when contemplating some big decision (the biggest might have been the one to sever Tet’s connection with IBM, a company that had shown an ever-increasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or preparing for some covert action (the fire-bombing of Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi, for instance, in the year before he died). The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke again in Cullum’s presence no matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to sleep with his hand clasped around it, he would think: ’Tis a sigul. ’Tis a sigul, dear—something that came from another world.

  If he had regrets toward the end (other than about some of the tricks, which were filthy indeed and cost more than one man his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the world on the other side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the town of Lovell. From time to time Roland’s sigul sent him dreams of a field filled with roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible visions of two crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly scanning the horizon. Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound of a man relentlessly winding his horn. From these latter dreams he would awake with tears on his cheeks, those of longing and loss and love. He would awake with his hand closed around the cross, thinking I denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger’s ka-tet and the White and never once questioned the choice.

  Yet for all that he wished he could have walked out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door.

  Now he said: “You boys want all the right things. I can’t put it any clearer than that. I believe you.” He hesitated. “I believe in you. What I see in your eyes is true.”

  Eddie thought he was done, and then Cullum grinned like a boy.

  “Also it ’pears to me you’re offerin the keys to one humongous great engine.” Engyne. “Who wouldn’t want to turn it on, and see what it does?”

  “Are you scared?” Roland asked.

  John Cullum considered the question, then nodded. “Ayuh,” he said.

  Roland nodded. “Good,” he said.

  Seven

  They drove back up to Turtleback Lane in Cullum’s car beneath a black, boiling sky. Although this was the height of the summer season and most of the cottages on Kezar were probably occupied, they saw not a single car moving in either direction. All the boats on the lake had long since run for cover.

  “Said I had somethin else for ya,” John said, and went to the back of his truck, where there was a steel lockbox snugged up against the cab. Now the wind had begun to blow. It swirled his scanty fluff of white hair around his head. He ran a combination, popped a padlock, and swung back the lockbox’s lid. From inside he brought out two dusty bags the wanderers knew well. One looked almost new compared to the other, which was the scuffed no-color of desert dust and laced its long length with rawhide.

  “Our gunna!” Eddie cried, so delighted—and so amazed—that the words almost came out in a scream. “How in the name of hell—?”

  John offered them a smile that augured well for his future as a dirty trickster: bemused on the surface, sly beneath. “Nice surprise, ain’t it? Thought so m’self. I went back to get a look at Chip’s store—what ’us left of it—while there was still a lot of confusion. People runnin hither, thither, and yon is what I mean to say; coverin bodies, stringin that yella tape, takin pitchers. Somebody’d put those bags off to one side and they looked just a dight lonely, so I…” He shrugged one bony shoulder. “I scooped em up.”

  “This would have been while we were visiting with Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau in their rented cabin,” Eddie said. “After you went back home, supposedly to pack for Vermont. Is that right?” He was stroking the side of his bag. He knew that smooth surface very well; hadn’t he shot the deer it had come from and scraped off the hair with Roland’s knife and stitched the hide himself, with Susannah to help him? Not long after the great robot bear Shardik had almost unzipped Eddie’s guts, that had been. Sometime in the last century, it seemed.

  “Yuh,” Cullum said, and when the old fellow’s smile sweetened, Eddie’s last doubts about him departed. They had found the right man for this world. Say true and thank Gan big-big.

  “Strap on your gun, Eddie,” Roland said, holding out the revolver with the worn sandalwood grips.

  Mine. Now he calls it mine. Eddie felt a small chill.

  “I thought we were going to Susannah and Jake.” But he took the revolver and belted it on willingly enough.

  Roland nodded. “But I believe we have a little work to do first, against those who killed Callahan and then tried to kill Jake.” His face didn’t change as he spoke, but both Eddie Dean and John Cullum felt a chill. For a moment it was almost impossible to look at the gunslinger.

  So came—although they did not know it, which was likely more mercy than such as they deserved—the death sentence of Flaherty, the taheen Lamla, and their ka-tet.

  Eight

  Oh my God, Eddie tried to say, but no sound came out.

  He had seen brightness growing ahead of them as they drove north along Turtleback Lane, following the one working taillight of Cullum’s truck. At first he thought it might be the carriage-lamps guarding some rich man’s driveway, then perhaps floodlights. But the glow kept strengthening, a blue-golden brilliance to their left, where the ridge sloped down to the lake. As they approached the source of the light (Cullum’s pickup now barely crawling), Eddie gasped and pointed as a circle of radiance broke free of the main body and flew toward them, changing colors as it came: blue to gold to red, red to green to gold and back to blue. In the center of it was something that looked like an insect with four wings. Then, as it soared above the bed of Cullum’s truck and into the dark woods on the east side of the road, it looked toward them and Eddie saw the insect had a human face.

  “What…dear God, Roland, what—”

  “Taheen,” Roland said, and said no more. In the growing brilliance his face was calm and tired.

  More circles of light broke free of the main body and streamed across the road in cometary splendor. Eddie saw flies and tiny jeweled hummingbirds and what appeared to be winged frogs. Beyond them…

  The taillight of Cullum’s truck flashed bright, but Eddie was so busy goggling that he would have rear-ended the man had Roland not spoken to him sharply. Eddie threw the Galaxie into Park without bothering to either set the emergency brake or turn off the engine. Then he got out and walked toward the blacktop driveway that descended the steep wooded slope. His eyes were huge in the delicate light, his mouth hung open. Cullum joined him and stood looking down. The driveway was flanked by two signs: CARA LAUGHS on the left and 19 on the right.

  “Somethin, ain’t it?” Cullum asked quietly.

  You got that right, Eddie tried to reply, and still no words would come out of his mouth, only a breathless wheeze.

  Most of the light was coming from the woods to the east of the road and to the left of the Cara Laughs driveway. Here the trees—mostly pines, spruces, and birches bent from a late-winter ice storm—were spread far apart, and hundreds of figures walked solemnly among them as though in a rustic ballroom, their bare feet scuffing through the leaves. Some were pretty clearly Children of Roderick, and as roont as Chevin of Chayven. Their skins were covered with the sores of ra
diation sickness and very few had more than a straggle of hair, but the light in which they walked gave them a beauty that was almost too great to look upon. Eddie saw a one-eyed woman carrying what appeared to be a dead child. She looked at him with an expression of sorrow and her mouth moved, but Eddie could hear nothing. He raised his fist to his forehead and bent his leg. Then he touched the corner of one eye and pointed to her. I see you, the gesture said…or so he hoped. I see you very well. The woman bearing the dead or sleeping child returned the gesture, and then passed from sight.

  Overhead, thunder cracked sharply and lightning flashed down into the center of the glow. An ancient fir tree, its lusty trunk girdled with moss, took the bolt and split apart down its center, falling half one way and half the other. The inside was on fire. And a great gust of sparks—not fire, not this, but something with the ethereal quality of swamplight—went twisting up toward the hanging swags of the clouds. In those sparks Eddie saw tiny dancing bodies, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. It was like watching a squadron of Tinker Bells, there and then gone.

  “Look at em,” John said reverently. “Walk-ins! Gorry, there’s hundreds! I wish my friend Donnie was here to see.”

  Eddie thought he was probably right: hundreds of men, women, and children were walking through the woods below them, walking through the light, appearing and disappearing and then appearing again. As he watched, he felt a cold drop of water splash his neck, followed by a second and a third. The wind swooped down through the trees, provoking another upward gush of those fairy-like creatures and turning the tree that had been halved by lightning into a pair of vast crackling torches.

  “Come on,” Roland said, grabbing Eddie’s arm. “It’s going to come a downpour and this’ll go out like a candle. If we’re still on this side when it does, we’ll be stuck here.”

  “Where—” Eddie began, and then he saw. Near the foot of the driveway, where the forest cover gave way to a tumble of rocks falling down to the lake, was the core of the glow, for the time being too bright to look at. Roland dragged him in that direction. John Cullum remained hypnotized for a moment longer by the walk-ins, then tried to follow them.

  “No!” Roland called over his shoulder. The rain was falling harder now, the drops cold on his skin and the size of coins. “You have your work, John! Fare you well!”

  “And you, boys!” John called back. He stopped and raised his hand in a wave. A bolt of electricity cut across the sky, momentarily lighting his face in brilliant blue and deepest black. “And you!”

  “Eddie, we’re going to run into the core of the light,” Roland said. “It’s not a door of the old people but of the Prim—that is magic, do ye ken. It’ll take us to the place we want, if we concentrate hard enough.”

  “Where—”

  “There’s no time! Jake’s told me where, by touch! Only hold my hand and keep your mind blank! I can take us!”

  Eddie wanted to ask him if he was absolutely sure of that, but there was no time. Roland broke into a run. Eddie joined him. They sprinted down the slope and into the light. Eddie felt it breathing over his skin like a million small mouths. Their boots crackled in the deep leaf cover. To his right was the burning tree. He could smell the sap and the sizzle of its cooking bark. Now they closed in on the core of the light. At first Eddie could see Kezar Lake through it and then he felt an enormous force grip him and pull him forward through the cold rain and into that brilliant murmuring glare. For just a moment he glimpsed the shape of a doorway. Then he redoubled his grip on Roland’s hand and closed his eyes. The leaf-littered ground ran out beneath his feet and they were flying.

  Chapter VII:

  Reunion

  One

  Flaherty stood at the New York/Fedic door, which had been scarred by several gunshots but otherwise stood whole against them, an impassable barrier which the shitting kid had somehow passed. Lamla stood silent beside him, waiting for Flaherty’s rage to exhaust itself. The others also waited, maintaining the same prudent silence.

  Finally the blows Flaherty had been raining on the door began to slow. He administered one final overhand smash, and Lamla winced as blood flew from the hume’s knuckles.

  “What?” Flaherty asked, catching his grimace. “What? Do you have something to say?”

  Lamla cared not at all for the white circles around Flaherty’s eyes and the hard red roses in Flaherty’s cheeks. Least of all for the way Flaherty’s hand had risen to the butt of the Glock automatic hanging beneath his armpit. “No,” he said. “No, sai.”

  “Go on, say what’s on your mind, do it please ya,” Flaherty persisted. He tried to smile and produced a gruesome grin instead—the leer of a madman. Quietly, with barely a rustle, the rest pulled back. “Others will have plenty to say; why shouldn’t you start, my cully? I lost him! Be the first to carp, you ugly motherfucker!”

  I’m dead, Lamla thought. After a life of service to the King, one unguarded expression in the presence of a man who needs a scapegoat, and I’m dead.

  He looked around, verifying that none of the others would step in for him, and then said: “Flaherty, if I’ve offended you in some way I’m sor—”

  “Oh, you’ve offended me, sure enough!” Flaherty shrieked, his Boston accent growing thicker as his rage escalated. “I’m sure I’ll pay for tonight’s work, aye, but I think you’ll pay fir—”

  There was a kind of gasp in the air around them, as if the corridor itself had inhaled sharply. Flaherty’s hair and Lamla’s fur rippled. Flaherty’s posse of low men and vampires began to turn. Suddenly one of them, a vamp named Albrecht, shrieked and bolted forward, allowing Flaherty a view of two newcomers, men with raindrops still fresh and dark on their jeans and boots and shirts. There was trail-dusty gunna-gar at their feet and revolvers hung at their hips. Flaherty saw the sandalwood grips in the instant before the younger one drew, faster than blue blazes, and understood at once why Albrecht had run. Only one sort of man carried guns that looked like that.

  The young one fired a single shot. Albrecht’s blond hair jumped as if flicked by an invisible hand and then he collapsed forward, fading within his clothes as he did so.

  “Hile, you bondsmen of the King,” the older one said. He spoke in a purely conversational tone. Flaherty—his hands still bleeding from his extravagant drumming on the door through which the snot-babby had disappeared—could not seem to get the sense of him. It was the one of whom they had been warned, surely it was Roland of Gilead, but how had he gotten here, and on their blindside? How?

  Roland’s cold blue eyes surveyed them. “Which of this sorry herd calls himself dinh? Will that one honor us by stepping forward or not? Not?” His eyes surveyed them; his left hand departed the vicinity of his gun and journeyed to the corner of his mouth, where a small sarcastic smile had bloomed. “Not? Too bad. Th’art cowards after all, I’m sorry to see. Thee’d kill a priest and chase a lad but not stand and claim thy day’s work. Th’art cowards and the sons of cow—”

  Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around the butt of the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker’s clutch. “That would be me, Roland-of-Steven.”

  “You know my name, do you?”

  “Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. T’is the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee until he spewed ’is—”

  Flaherty drew as he spoke, a bushwhacker’s trick he’d no doubt practiced and used before to advantage. And although he was fast and the forefinger of Roland’s left hand still touched the side of his mouth when Flaherty’s draw began, the gunslinger beat him easily. His first bullet passed between the lips of Jake’s chief harrier, exploding the teeth at the front of his upper jaw to bone fragments which Flaherty drew down his throat with his dying breath. His second pierced Flaherty’s forehead between the eyebrows and he was flung back against the New York/Fedic door with the unfired Glock spilling from his hand to discharge a final time on the h
allway floor.

  Most of the others drew a split-second later. Eddie killed the six in front, having taken time to reload the chamber he’d fired at Albrecht. When the revolver was empty, he rolled behind his dinh to reload, as he had been taught. Roland picked off the next five, then rolled smoothly behind Eddie, who took out the rest save one.

  Lamla had been too cunning to try and so was the last standing. He raised his empty hands, the fingers furry and the palms smooth. “Will ye grant me parole, gunslinger, if I promise ye peace?”

  “Not a bit,” Roland said, and cocked his revolver.

  “Be damned to you, then, chary-ka,” said the taheen, and Roland of Gilead shot him where he stood, and Lamla of Galee fell down dead.

  Two

  Flaherty’s posse lay stacked in front of the door like cordwood, Lamla facedown in front. Not a single one had had a chance to fire. The tile-throated corridor stank of the gunsmoke which hung in a blue layer. Then the purifiers kicked in, chugging wearily in the wall, and the gunslingers felt the air first stirred into motion and then sucked across their faces.

  Eddie reloaded the gun—his, now, so he had been told—and dropped it back into its holster. Then he went to the dead and yanked four of them absently aside so he could get to the door. “Susannah! Suze, are you there?”

  Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts’ deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

  So Eddie didn’t expect her to answer until she did—from another world, and through a single thickness of wood. “Eddie? Sugar, is it you?”