Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  “What I remember,” Eddie said, still without looking up, “is the smell of the gasoline. I fired my dinh’s gun, do you recall that? I suppose we were lucky there were no fumes, and that I fired it in the right direction. They poured gasoline all over the corner where you keep your desk. They were going to burn your favorite books…or should I say your best friends, your family? Because that’s what they are to you, aren’t they? And Deepneau, who the fuck is he? Just some old guy full of cancer who ran north with you when you needed a running buddy. You’d leave him dying in a ditch if someone offered you a first edition of Shakespeare or some special Ernest Hemingway.”

  “I resent that!” Tower cried. “I happen to know that my bookshop has been burned flat, and through an oversight it’s uninsured! I’m ruined, and it’s all your fault! I want you out of here!”

  “You defaulted on the insurance when you needed cash to buy that Hopalong Cassidy collection from the Clarence Mulford estate last year,” Aaron Deepneau said mildly. “You told me that insurance lapse was only temporary, but—”

  “It was!” Tower said. He sounded both injured and surprised, as if he had never expected betrayal from this quarter. Probably he hadn’t. “Itwas only temporary, goddammit!”

  “—but to blame this young man,” Deepneau went on in that same composed but regretful voice, “seems most unfair.”

  “I want you out of here!” Tower snarled at Eddie. “You and your friend, as well! I have no wish to do business with you! If you ever thought I did, it was a…amisapprehension! ” He seized upon this last word as though upon a prize, and nearly shouted it out.

  Eddie clasped his hands more tightly yet. He had never been more aware of the gun he was wearing; it had gained a kind of balefully lively weight. He reeked with sweat; he could smell it. And now drops of blood began to ooze out from between his palms and fall to the floor. He could feel his teeth beginning to sink into his tongue. Well, it was certainly a way to forget the pain in one’s leg. Eddie decided to give the tongue in question another brief conditional parole.

  “What I remember most clearly about my visit to you—”

  “You have some books that belong to me,” Tower said. “I want them back. Iinsist on—”

  “Shut up, Cal,” Deepneau said.

  “What?”Tower did not sound wounded now; he sounded shocked. Almost breathless.

  “Stop squirming. You’ve earned this scolding, and you know it. If you’re lucky, a scolding is all it will be. So shut up and for once in your life take it like a man.”

  “Hear him very well,” Roland said in a tone of dry approval.

  “What I remember most clearly,” Eddie pushed on, “is how horrified you were by what I told Jack—about how I and my friends would fill Grand Army Plaza with corpses if he didn’t lay off. Some of them women and children. You didn’t like that, but do you know what, Cal? Jack Andolini’s here, right now, in East Stoneham.”

  “Youlie! ” Tower said. He drew in breath as he said it, turning the words into an inhaled scream.

  “God,” Eddie replied, “if only I did. I saw two innocent women die, Cal. In the general store, this was. Andolini set an ambush, and if you were a praying man—I suppose you’re not, unless there’s some first edition you feel in danger of losing, but if you were—you might want to get down on your knees and pray to the god of selfish, obsessed, greedy, uncaring dishonest bookstore owners that it was a woman namedMia who told Balazar’s dinh where we were probably going to end up,her, not you. Because if they followedyou, Calvin, those two women’s blood is onyour hands! ”

  His voice was rising steadily, and although Eddie was still looking steadfastly down, his whole body had begun to tremble. He could feel his eyes bulging in their sockets and the cords of strain standing out on his neck. He could feel his balls drawn all the way up, as small and as hard as peach-pits. Most of all he could feel the desire to spring across the room, as effortless as a ballet dancer, and bury his hands in Calvin Tower’s fat white throat. He was waiting for Roland to intervene—hopingfor Roland to intervene—but the gunslinger did not, and Eddie’s voice continued to rise toward the inevitable scream of fury.

  “One of those women went right down but the other…she stayed up for a couple of seconds. A bullet took off the top of her head. I think it was a machine-gun bullet, and for the couple of seconds she stayed on her feet, she looked like a volcano. Only she was blowing blood instead of lava. Well, but it was probably Mia who ratted. I’ve got a feeling about that. It’s not entirely logical, but luckily for you, it’sstrong. Mia using what Susannah knew and protecting her chap.”

  “Mia? Young man—Mr. Dean—I know no—”

  “Shut up!” Eddie cried. “Shut up, you rat! You lying, reneging weasel! You greedy, grasping, piggy excuse for a man! Why didn’t you take out a few billboards? H I, I’M CAL TOWER ! I’ M STAYING ON THE ROCKET ROAD IN EAST STONEHAM! W HY DON ’ T YOU COME SEE ME AND MY FRIEND, AARON! B RING GUNS! ”

  Slowly, Eddie looked up. Tears of rage were rolling down his face. Tower had backed up against the wall to one side of the door, his eyes huge and moist in his round face. Sweat stood out on his brow. He held his bag of freshly acquired books against his chest like a shield.

  Eddie looked at him steadily. Blood dripped from between his tightly clasped hands; the spot of blood on the arm of his shirt had begun to spread again; now a trickle of blood ran from the left side of his mouth, as well. And he supposed he understood Roland’s silence. This was Eddie Dean’s job. Because he knew Tower inside as well as out, didn’t he? Knew him very well. Once upon a time not so long ago hadn’t he himself thought everything in the world but heroin pale and unimportant? Hadn’t he believed everything in the world that wasn’t heroin up for barter or sale? Had he not come to a point when he would literally have pimped his own mother in order to get the next fix? Wasn’t that why he was so angry?

  “That lot on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street was never yours,” Eddie said. “Not your father’s, or his father’s, all the way back to Stefan Toren. You were only custodians, the same way I’m custodian of the gun I wear.”

  “I deny that!”

  “Do you?” Aaron asked. “How strange. I’ve heard you speak of that piece of land in almost those exact words—”

  “Aaron, shut up!”

  “—many times,” Deepneau finished calmly.

  There was a pop. Eddie jumped, sending a fresh throb of pain up his leg from the hole in his shin. It was a match. Roland was lighting another cigarette. The filter lay on the oilcloth covering the table with two others. They looked like little pills.

  “Here is what you said to me,” Eddie said, and all at once he was calm. The rage was out of him, like poison drawn from a snakebite. Roland had let him do that much, and despite his bleeding tongue and bleeding palms, he was grateful.

  “Anything I said…I was under stress…I was afraid you might kill me yourself!”

  “You said you had an envelope from March of 1846. You said there was a sheet of paper in the envelope, and a name written on the paper. You said—”

  “I deny—”

  “You said that if I could tell you the name written on that piece of paper, you’d sell me the lot. For one dollar. And with the understanding that you’d be getting a great deal more—millions—between now and…1985, let’s say.”

  Tower barked a laugh. “Why not offer me the Brooklyn Bridge while you’re at it?”

  “You made a promise. And now your father watches you attempt to break it.”

  Calvin Tower shrieked:“I DENY EVERY WORD YOU SAY!”

  “Deny and be damned,” Eddie said. “And now I’m going to tell you something, Cal, something I know from my own beat-up but still beating heart. You’re eating a bitter meal. You don’t know that because someone told you it was sweet and your own tastebuds are numb.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about! You’re crazy!”

  “No,” Aaron said. “He
’s not. You’re the one who’s crazy if you don’t listen to him. I think…I think he’s giving you a chance to redeem the purpose of your life.”

  “Give it up,” Eddie said. “Just once listen to the better angel instead of to the other one. That other one hates you, Cal. It only wants to kill you. Believe me, I know.”

  Silence in the cabin. From the pond came the cry of a loon. From across it came the less lovely sound of sirens.

  Calvin Tower licked his lips and said, “Are you telling the truth about Andolini? Is he really in this town?”

  “Yes,” Eddie said. Now he could hear thewhuppa-whuppa-whup of an approaching helicopter. A TV news chopper? Wasn’t this still about five years too early for such things, especially up here in the boondocks?

  The bookstore owner’s eyes shifted to Roland. Tower had been surprised, and he’d been guilt-tripped with a vengeance, but the man was already regaining some of his composure. Eddie could see it, and he reflected (not for the first time) on how much simpler life would be if people would stay in the pigeonholes where you originally put them. He did not want to waste time thinking of Calvin Tower as a brave man, or as even second cousin to the good guys, but maybe he was both those things. Damn him.

  “You’re truly Roland of Gilead?”

  Roland regarded him through rising membranes of cigarette smoke. “You say true, I say thank ya.”

  “Roland of the Eld?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of Steven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grandson of Alaric?”

  Roland’s eyes flickered with what was probably surprise. Eddie himself was surprised, but what he mostly felt was a kind of tired relief. The questions Tower was asking could mean only two things. First, more had been passed down to him than just Roland’s name and trade of hand. Second, he was coming around.

  “Of Alaric, aye,” Roland said, “him of the red hair.”

  “I don’t know anything about his hair, but I know why he went to Garlan. Do you?”

  “To slay a dragon.”

  “And did he?”

  “No, he was too late. The last in that part of the world had been slain by another king, one who was later murdered.”

  Now, to Eddie’s even greater surprise, Tower haltingly addressed Roland in a language that was a second cousin to English at best. What Eddie heard was something likeHad heet Rol-uh, fa heet gun, fa heet hak, fa-had gun?

  Roland nodded and replied in the same tongue, speaking slowly and carefully. When he was finished, Tower sagged against the wall and dropped his bag of books unheeded to the floor. “I’ve been a fool,” he said.

  No one contradicted him.

  “Roland, would you step outside with me? I need…I…need…” Tower began to cry. He said something else in that not-English language, once more ending on a rising inflection, as if asking a question.

  Roland got up without replying. Eddie also got up, wincing at the pain in his leg. There was a slug in there, all right, he could feel it. He grabbed Roland’s arm, pulled him down, and whispered in the gunslinger’s ear: “Don’t forget that Tower and Deepneau have an appointment at the Turtle Bay Washateria, four years from now. Tell him Forty-seventh Street, between Second and First. He probably knows the place. Tower and Deepneau were…are…will bethe ones who save Don Callahan’s life. I’m almost sure of it.”

  Roland nodded, then crossed to Tower, who initially cringed away and then straightened with a conscious effort. Roland took his hand in the way of the Calla, and led him outside.

  When they were gone, Eddie said to Deepneau, “Draw up the contract. He’s selling.”

  Deepneau regarded him skeptically. “You really think so?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “I really do.”

  Seven

  Drawing the contract didn’t take long. Deepneau found a pad in the kitchen (there was a cartoon beaver on top of each sheet, and the legend DAM IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO ) and wrote it on that, pausing every now and then to ask Eddie a question.

  When they were finished, Deepneau looked at Eddie’s sweat-shiny face and said, “I have some Percocet tablets. Would you like some?”

  “You bet,” Eddie said. If he took them now, he thought—hoped—he would be ready for what he wanted Roland to do when Roland got back. The bullet was still in there, in there for sure, and it had to come out. “How about four?”

  Deepneau’s eyes measured him.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Eddie said. Then added: “Unfortunately.”

  Eight

  Aaron found a couple of children’s Band-Aids in the cabin’s medicine chest (Snow White on one, Bambi on another) and put them over the hole in Eddie’s arm after pouring another shot of disinfectant into the wound’s entry and exit points. Then, while drawing a glass of water to go with the painkillers, he asked Eddie where he came from. “Because,” he said, “although you wear that gun with authority, you sound a lot more like Cal and me than you do him.”

  Eddie grinned. “There’s a perfectly good reason for that. I grew up in Brooklyn. Co-Op City.” And thought:Suppose I were to tell you that I’m there right now, as a matter of fact? Eddie Dean, the world’s horniest fifteen-year-old, running wild in the streets? For that Eddie Dean, the most important thing in the world is getting laid. Such things as the fall of the Dark Tower and some ultimate baddie named the Crimson King won’t bother me for another—

  Then he saw the way Aaron Deepneau was looking at him and came out of his own head in a hurry. “What? Have I got a booger hanging out of my nose, or something?”

  “Co-Op City’s not in Brooklyn,” Deepneau said. He spoke as one does to a small child. “Co-Op City’s in the Bronx. Always has been.”

  “That’s—” Eddie began, meaning to addridiculous, but before he could get it out, the world seemed to waver on its axis. Again he was overwhelmed by that sense of fragility, that sense of the entire universe (or an entirecontinuum of universes) made of crystal instead of steel. There was no way to speak rationally of what he was feeling, because there was nothing rational about what was happening.

  “There are more worlds than these,” he said. “That was what Jake told Roland just before he died. ‘Go, then—there are other worlds than these.’ And he must have been right, because he came back.”

  “Mr. Dean?” Deepneau looked concerned. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but you’ve come over very pale. I think you should sit down.”

  Eddie allowed himself to be led back into the cabin’s combination kitchen and sitting room. Did he himself understand what he was talking about? Or how Aaron Deepneau—presumably a lifelong New Yorker—could assert with such casual assurance that Co-Op City was in the Bronx when Eddie knew it to be in Brooklyn?

  Not entirely, but he understood enough to scare the hell out of him. Other worlds. Perhaps an infinite number of worlds, all of them spinning on the axle that was the Tower. All of them were similar, but therewere differences. Different politicians on the currency. Different makes of automobiles—Takuro Spirits instead of Datsuns, for instance—and different major league baseball teams. In these worlds, one of which had been decimated by a plague called the superflu, you could time-hop back and forth, past and future. Because…

  Because in some vital way, they aren’t the real world. Or if they’re real, they’re not the key world.

  Yes, that felt closer. He had come from one of those other worlds, he was convinced of it. So had Susannah. And Jakes One and Two, the one who had fallen and the one who had been literally pulled out of the monster’s mouth and saved.

  But this world was the key world. And he knew it because he was a key-makerby trade:Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

  Beryl Evans? Not quite real. Claudia y Inez Bachman? Real.

  World with Co-Op City in Brooklyn? Not quite real. World with Co-Op City in the Bronx? Real, hard as it was to swallow.

  And he had an idea that Callahan had crossed over from the r
eal world to one of the others long before he had embarked on his highways in hiding; had crossed without even knowing it. He’d said something about officiating at some little boy’s funeral, and how, after that…

  “After that he said everything changed,” Eddie said as he sat down. “Thateverything changed. ”

  “Yes, yes,” Aaron Deepneau said, patting him on the shoulder. “Sit quietly now.”

  “Pere went from a seminary in Boston to Lowell, real. ’Salem’s Lot, not real. Made up by a writer named—”

  “I’m going to get a cold compress for your forehead.”

  “Good idea,” Eddie said, closing his eyes. His mind was whirling. Real, not real. Live, Memorex. John Cullum’s retired professor friend was right: the column of truthdid have a hole in it.

  Eddie wondered if anyone knew how deep that hole went.

  Nine

  It was a different Calvin Tower who came back to the cabin with Roland fifteen minutes later, a quiet and chastened Calvin Tower. He asked Deepneau if Deepneau had written a bill of sale, and when Deepneau nodded, Tower said nothing, only nodded back. He went to the fridge and returned with several cans of Blue Ribbon beer and handed them around. Eddie refused, not wanting to put alcohol on top of the Percs.

  Tower did not offer a toast, but drank off half his beer at a single go. “It isn’t every day I get called the scum of the earth by a man who promises to make me a millionaire and also to relieve me of my heart’s heaviest burden. Aaron, will this thing stand up in court?”

  Aaron Deepneau nodded. Rather regretfully, Eddie thought.

  “All right, then,” Tower said. Then, after a pause: “All right, let’s do it.” But still he didn’t sign.

  Roland spoke to him in that other language. Tower flinched, then signed his name in a quick scrawl, his lips tucked into a line so narrow his mouth seemed almost not to be there. Eddie signed for the Tet Corporation, marveling at how strange the pen felt in his hand—he couldn’t remember when last he had held one.

  When the thing was done, sai Tower reverted—looked at Eddie and cried in a cracked voice that was almost a shriek, “There! I’m a pauper! Give me my dollar! I’m promised a dollar! I feel a need to take a shit coming on and I need something to wipe my ass with!”