Dark Tower V, The Read online

  “Come to Seven-Mile,” Overholser said. “We’ll have you and say thankee, Roland.”

  “Our place is much smaller,” Tian said, “but Zalia and I—”

  “We’d be so pleased to have’ee,” Zalia said. She had flushed as deeply as Overholser. “Aye, we would.”

  Roland said, “Do you have a house as well as a church, sai Callahan?”

  Callahan smiled. “I do, and tell God thankya.”

  “We might stay with you on our first night in Calla Bryn Sturgis,” Roland said. “Could we do that?”

  “Sure, and welcome.”

  “You could show us your church. Introduce us to its mysteries.”

  Callahan’s gaze was steady. “I’d welcome the chance to do that.”

  “In the days after,” Roland said, smiling, “we shall throw ourselves on the hospitality of the town.”

  “You’ll not find it wanting,” Tian said. “That I promise ye.” Overholser and Slightman were nodding.

  “If the meal we’ve just eaten is any sign, I’m sure that’s true. We say thankee, sai Jaffords; thankee one and all. For a week we four will go about your town, poking our noses here and there. Mayhap a bit longer, but likely a week. We’ll look at the lay of the land and the way the buildings are set on it. Look with an eye to the coming of these Wolves. We’ll talk to folk, and folk will talk to us—those of you here now will see to that, aye?”

  Callahan was nodding. “I can’t speak for the Manni, but I’m sure the rest will be more than willing to talk to you about the Wolves. God and Man Jesus knows they’re no secret. And those of the Crescent are frightened to death of them. If they see a chance you might be able to help us, they’ll do all you ask.”

  “The Manni will speak to me as well,” Roland said. “I’ve held palaver with them before.”

  “Don’t be carried away with the Old Fella’s enthusiasm, Roland,” Overholser said. He raised his plump hands in the air, a gesture of caution. “There are others in town you’ll have to convince—”

  “Vaughn Eisenhart, for one,” said Slightman.

  “Aye, and Eben Took, do ya,” Overholser said. “The General Store’s the only thing his name’s on, ye ken, but he owns the boarding house and the restaurant out front of it…as well’s a half-interest in the livery…and loan-paper on most of the smallholds hereabouts.

  “When it comes to the smallholds, ’ee mustn’t neglect Bucky Javier,” Overholser rumbled. “He ain’t the biggest of em, but only because he gave away half of what he had to his young sister when she married.” Overholser leaned toward Roland, his face alight with a bit of town history about to be passed on. “Roberta Javier, Bucky’s sissa, she’s lucky,” he said. “When the Wolves came last time, she and her twin brother were but a year old. So they were passed over.”

  “Bucky’s own twin brother was took the time before,” Slightman said. “Bully’s dead now almost four year. Of the sickness. Since then, there ain’t enough Bucky can do for those younger two. But you should talk to him, aye. Bucky’s not got but eighty acre, yet he’s trig.”

  Roland thought, They still don’t see.

  “Thank you,” he said. “What lies directly ahead for us comes down to looking and listening, mostly. When it’s done, we’ll ask that whoever is in charge of the feather take it around so that a meeting can be called. At that meeting, we’ll tell you if the town can be defended and how many men we’ll want to help us, if it can be done.”

  Roland saw Overholser puffing up to speak and shook his head at him.

  “It won’t be many we’d want, in any case,” he said. “We’re gunslingers, not an army. We think differently, act differently, than armies do. We might ask for as many as five to stand with us. Probably fewer—only two or three. But we might need more to help us prepare.”

  “Why?” Benny asked.

  Roland smiled. “That I can’t say yet, son, because I haven’t seen how things are in your Calla. But in cases like this, surprise is always the most potent weapon, and it usually takes many people to prepare a good surprise.”

  “The greatest surprise to the Wolves,” Tian said, “would be if we fought at all.”

  “Suppose you decide the Calla can’t be defended?” Overholser asked. “Tell me that, I beg.”

  “Then I and my friends will thank you for your hospitality and ride on,” Roland said, “for we have our own business farther along the Path of the Beam.” He observed Tian’s and Zalia’s crestfallen faces for a moment, then said: “I don’t think that’s likely, you know. There’s usually a way.”

  “May the meeting receive your judgment favorably,” Overholser said.

  Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth home, should he want to. If these people still believed a tet of gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a public meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters would play out and become part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history and his quest in Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps not even that; perhaps he’d finish in a dead heap somewhere east of town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked over by the crows and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did.

  Meanwhile, they were looking at him.

  Roland stood up, wincing at a hard flare of pain in his right hip as he did so. Taking their cues from him, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake also rose.

  “We’re well-met,” Roland said. “As for what lies ahead, there will be water if God wills it.”

  Callahan said, “Amen.”

  Chapter VII:

  Todash

  One

  “Gray horses,” Eddie said.

  “Aye,” Roland agreed.

  “Fifty or sixty of them, all on gray horses.”

  “Aye, so they did say.”

  “And didn’t think it the least bit strange,” Eddie mused.

  “No. They didn’t seem to.”

  “Is it?”

  “Fifty or sixty horses, all the same color? I’d say so, yes.”

  “These Calla-folk raise horses themselves.”

  “Aye.”

  “Brought some for us to ride.” Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in his life, was grateful that at least had been put off, but didn’t say so.

  “Aye, tethered over the hill.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them.”

  “Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade, as a matter of course?”

  “Because they don’t really think about the Wolves or anything to do with them,” Roland said. “They’re too busy being afraid, I think.”

  Eddie whistled five notes that didn’t quite make a melody. Then he said, “Gray horses.”

  Roland nodded. “Gray horses.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties…but he loved it. Maybe it was just that Roland laughed so seldom.

  It was late afternoon. Overhead, the clouds had thinned enough to turn a pallid blue that was almost the color of sky. The Overholser party had returned to their camp. Susannah and Jake had gone back along the forest road to pick more muffin-balls. After the big meal they’d packed away, none of them wanted anything heavier. Eddie sat on a log, whittling. Beside him sat Roland, with all their guns broken down and spread out before him on a piece of deerskin. He oiled the pieces one by one, holding each bolt and cylinder and barrel up to the daylight for a final look before setting it aside for reassembly.

  “You told them it was out of their hands,” Eddie said, “but they didn’t ken that any more than they did the business about all those gray horses. And you didn’t press it.”

  “Only would have distressed them,” Roland
said. “There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eddie said. “There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can’t get snot off a suede jacket.” He held up the object he was making. It would be a top, Roland thought, a toy for a baby. And again he wondered how much Eddie might know about the woman he lay down with each night. The women. Not on the top of his mind, but underneath. “If you decide we can help them, then we have to help them. That’s what Eld’s Way really boils down to, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Roland said.

  “And if we can’t get any of them to stand with us, we stand alone.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about that,” Roland said. He had a saucer filled with light, sweet gun-oil. Now he dipped the corner of a chamois rag into it, picked up the spring-clip of Jake’s Ruger, and began to clean it. “Tian Jaffords would stand with us, come to that. Surely he has a friend or two who’d do the same regardless of what their meeting decides. In a pinch, there’s his wife.”

  “And if we get them both killed, what about their kids? They have five. Also, I think there’s an old guy in the picture. One of em’s Grampy. They probably take care of him, too.”

  Roland shrugged. A few months ago, Eddie would have mistaken that gesture—and the gunslinger’s expressionless face—for indifference. Now he knew better. Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

  “What if we get killed in this little town, screwing around with these Wolves?” Eddie asked. “Isn’t your last thought gonna be something like, ‘I can’t believe what a putz I was, throwing away my chance to get to the Dark Tower in order to take up for a bunch of snotnose brats.’ Or similar sentiments.”

  “Unless we stand true, we’ll never get within a thousand miles of the Tower,” Roland said. “Would you tell me you don’t feel that?”

  Eddie couldn’t, because he did. He felt something else, as well: a species of bloodthirsty eagerness. He actually wanted to fight again. Wanted to have a few of these Wolves, whatever they were, in the sights of one of Roland’s big revolvers. There was no sense kidding himself about the truth: he wanted to take a few scalps.

  Or wolf-masks.

  “What’s really troubling you, Eddie? I’d have you speak while it’s just you and me.” The gunslinger’s mouth quirked in a thin, slanted smile. “Do ya, I beg.”

  “Shows, huh?”

  Roland shrugged and waited.

  Eddie considered the question. It was a big question. Facing it made him feel desperate and inadequate, pretty much the way he’d felt when faced with the task of carving the key that would let Jake Chambers through into their world. Only then he’d had the ghost of his big brother to blame, Henry whispering deep down in his head that he was no good, never had been, never would be. Now it was just the enormity of what Roland was asking. Because everything was troubling him, everything was wrong. Everything. Or maybe wrong was the wrong word, and by a hundred and eighty degrees. Because in another way things seemed too right, too perfect, too…

  “Arrrggghh,” Eddie said. He grabbed bunches of hair on both sides of his head and pulled. “I can’t think of a way to say it.”

  “Then say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don’t hesitate.”

  “Nineteen,” Eddie said. “This whole deal has gone nineteen.”

  He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and kicked his feet like a kid doing a tantrum. He thought: Maybe killing a few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that’s all it will take.

  Two

  Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, “Do you feel better?”

  Eddie sat up. “Actually I do.”

  Roland nodded, smiling a little. “Then can you say more? If you can’t, we’ll let it go, but I’ve come to respect your feelings, Eddie—far more than you realize—and if you’d speak, I’d hear.”

  What he said was true. The gunslinger’s initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar’s office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood’s always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns’s deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland’s old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage’s good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called “heart.”

  But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.

  “All right, then,” Eddie said. “Don’t stop me. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”

  Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn’t come back, at least not just yet.

  “I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen written in blue.”

  Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.

  “I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser’s and Callahan’s. But that’s just what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of.” Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland’s eyes. “Here’s another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that’s right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned.”

  Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.

  “Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because…ah, man, this is hard…Roland, everything here is real, but it’s not.”

  Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn’t his world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond—but again kept his mouth closed.

  Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. “Real,” he said. “I can feel it and smell it.” He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. “I can taste it. And at the same time, it’s as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand it very well,” Roland murmured.

  “The people are real. You…Susannah…Jake…that guy Gasher who snatched Jake…Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that’s not real. It’s not sensible or logical, either, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just not real. Why do people over here sing ‘Hey Jude’? I don’t know. That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn’t seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There’s a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It’s not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!”

  Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.

  “The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel y
ou know. Maybe you don’t like em all—Overholser’s a little hard to swallow—but you feel you know em.”

  Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn’t even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable—farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell. The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman’s sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?

  As for that, Eddie says I have none, he thought.

  “The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem,” Eddie was continuing. “And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy tale villains. I know it’s real—people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real, the crying afterward will be real—but at the same time there’s something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery.”

  “And New York?” Roland asked. “How did that feel to you?”

  “The same,” Eddie said. “I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on the table after Jake took Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book…and then, out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up! That fuck!”

  “Here, here, now!” Susannah called merrily from behind them. “No profanity, boys.” Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with it.

  Roland said, “Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not exactly unreality, Roland. It—”

  “Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away. Doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Eddie said. “When I’m with her.”

  He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.

  Three