The Dark Tower VII Read online

  There were still lights on down there, he saw: a double white row that might have been streetlights in “Pleasantville,” yellow circles that were probably arc-sodiums along the various paths of what Susannah was calling Breaker U…and spotlights running random patterns across the dark.

  No, Jake thought, not spotlights. Searchlights. Like in a prison movie. “Let’s go back,” he said. “There’s nothing to see anymore, and I don’t like it out here in the dark.”

  Roland agreed. They followed him in single file, with Eddie carrying Susannah and Jake walking behind them with Oy at his heel. He kept expecting a second desert-dog to take up the cry of the first, but none did.

  Four

  “They were wood,” Jake said. He was sitting cross-legged beneath one of the gas lanterns, letting its welcome white glow shine down on his face.

  “Wood,” Eddie agreed.

  Susannah hesitated a moment, sensing it was a question of real importance and reviewing what she had seen. Then she also nodded. “Wood, I’m almost positive. Especially the one they call Damli House. A Queen Anne built out of stone or brick and camouflaged to look like wood? It makes no sense.”

  “If it fools wandering folk who’d burn it down,” Roland said, “it does. It does make sense.”

  Susannah thought about it. He was right, of course, but—

  “I still say wood.”

  Roland nodded. “So do I.” He had found a large green bottle marked PERRIER. Now he opened it and ascertained that Perrier was water. He took five cups and poured a measure into each. He set them down in front of Jake, Susannah, Eddie, Oy, and himself.

  “Do you call me dinh?” he asked Eddie.

  “Yes, Roland, you know I do.”

  “Will you share khef with me, and drink this water?”

  “Yes, if you like.” Eddie had been smiling, but now he wasn’t. The feeling was back, and it was strong. Ka-shume, a rueful word he did not yet know.

  “Drink, bondsman.”

  Eddie didn’t exactly like being called bondsman, but he drank his water. Roland knelt before him and put a brief, dry kiss on Eddie’s lips. “I love you, Eddie,” he said, and outside in the ruin that was Thunderclap, a desert wind arose, carrying gritty poisoned dust.

  “Why…I love you, too,” Eddie said. It was surprised out of him. “What’s wrong? And don’t tell me nothing is, because I feel it.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Roland said, smiling, but Jake had never heard the gunslinger sound so sad. It terrified him. “It’s only ka-shume, and it comes to every ka-tet that ever was…but now, while we are whole, we share our water. We share our khef. ’Tis a jolly thing to do.”

  He looked at Susannah.

  “Do you call me dinh?”

  “Yes, Roland, I call you dinh.” She looked very pale, but perhaps it was only the white light from the gas lanterns.

  “Will you share khef with me, and drink this water?”

  “With pleasure,” said she, and took up the plastic cup.

  “Drink, bondswoman.”

  She drank, her grave dark eyes never leaving his. She thought of the voices she’d heard in her dream of the Oxford jail-cell: this one dead, that one dead, t’other one dead; O Discordia, and the shadows grow deeper.

  Roland kissed her mouth. “I love you, Susannah.”

  “I love you, too.”

  The gunslinger turned to Jake. “Do you call me dinh?”

  “Yes,” Jake said. There was no question about his pallor; even his lips were ashy. “Ka-shume means death, doesn’t it? Which one of us will it be?”

  “I know not,” Roland said, “and the shadow may yet lift from us, for the wheel’s still in spin. Did you not feel ka-shume when you and Callahan went into the place of the vampires?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ka-shume for both?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet here you are. Our ka-tet is strong, and has survived many dangers. It may survive this one, too.”

  “But I feel—”

  “Yes,” Roland said. His voice was kind, but that awful look was in his eyes. The look that was beyond mere sadness, the one that said this would be whatever it was, but the Tower was beyond, the Dark Tower was beyond and it was there that he dwelt, heart and soul, ka and khef. “Yes, I feel it, too. So do we all. Which is why we take water, which is to say fellowship, one with the other. Will you share khef with me, and share this water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drink, bondsman.”

  Jake did. Then, before Roland could kiss him, he dropped the cup, flung his arms about the gunslinger’s neck, and whispered fiercely into his ear: “Roland, I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, and released him. Outside, the wind gusted again. Jake waited for something to howl—perhaps in triumph—but nothing did.

  Smiling, Roland turned to the billy-bumbler.

  “Oy of Mid-World, do you call me dinh?”

  “Dinh!” Oy said.

  “Will you share khef with me, and this water?”

  “Khef! Wat’!”

  “Drink, bondsman.”

  Oy inserted his snout into his plastic cup—an act of some delicacy—and lapped until the water was gone. Then he looked up expectantly. There were beads of Perrier on his whiskers.

  “Oy, I love you,” Roland said, and leaned his face within range of the bumbler’s sharp teeth. Oy licked his cheek a single time, then poked his snout back into the glass, hoping for a missed drop or two.

  Roland put out his hands. Jake took one and Susannah the other. Soon they were all linked. Like drunks at the end of an A.A. meeting, Eddie thought.

  “We are ka-tet,” Roland said. “We are one from many. We have shared our water as we have shared our lives and our quest. If one should fall, that one will not be lost, for we are one and will not forget, even in death.”

  They held hands a moment longer. Roland was the first to let go.

  “What’s your plan?” Susannah asked him. She didn’t call him sugar; never called him that or any other endearment ever again, so far as Jake was aware. “Will you tell us?”

  Roland nodded toward the Wollensak tape recorder, still sitting on the barrel. “Perhaps we should listen to that first,” he said. “I do have a plan of sorts, but what Brautigan has to say might help with some of the details.”

  Five

  Night in Thunderclap is the very definition of darkness: no moon, no stars. Yet if we were to stand outside the cave where Roland and his tet have just shared khef and will now listen to the tapes Ted Brautigan has left them, we’d see two red coals floating in that wind-driven darkness. If we were to climb the path up the side of Steek-Tete toward those floating coals (a dangerous proposition in the dark), we’d eventually come upon a seven-legged spider now crouched over the queerly deflated body of a mutie coyote. This can-toi-tete was a literally misbegotten thing in life, with the stub of a fifth leg jutting from its chest and a jellylike mass of flesh hanging down between its rear legs like a deformed udder, but its flesh nourishes Mordred, and its blood—taken in a series of long, steaming gulps—is as sweet as a dessert wine. There are, in truth, all sorts of things to eat over here. Mordred has no friends to lift him from place to place via the seven-league boots of teleportation, but he found his journey from Thunderclap Station to Steek-Tete far from arduous.

  He has overheard enough to be sure of what his father is planning: a surprise attack on the facility below. They’re badly outnumbered, but Roland’s band of shooters is fiercely devoted to him, and surprise is ever a powerful weapon.

  And gunslingers are what Jake would call fou, crazy when their blood is up, and afraid of nothing. Such insanity is an even more powerful weapon.

  Mordred was born with a fair amount of inbred knowledge, it seems. He knows, for instance, that his Red Father, possessed of such information as Mordred now has, would have sent word of the gunslinger’s presence at once to the Devar-Toi’s Master or Security Chief. And then, sometime later tonight,
the ka-tet out of Mid-World would have found themselves ambushed. Killed in their sleep, mayhap, thus allowing the Breakers to continue the King’s work. Mordred wasn’t born with a knowledge of that work, but he’s capable of logic and his ears are sharp. He now understands what the gunslingers are about: they have come here to break the Breakers.

  He could stop it, true, but Mordred feels no interest in his Red Father’s plans or ambitions. What he most truly enjoys, he’s discovering, is the bitter loneliness of outside. Of watching with the cold interest of a child watching life and death and war and peace through the glass wall of the antfarm on his bureau.

  Would he let yon ki’-dam actually kill his White Father? Oh, probably not. Mordred is reserving that pleasure for himself, and he has his reasons; already he has his reasons. But as for the others—the young man, the shor’-leg woman, the kid—yes, if ki’-dam Prentiss gets the upper hand, by all means let him kill any or all three of them. As for Mordred Deschain, he will let the game play out straight. He will watch. He will listen. He will hear the screams and smell the burning and watch the blood soak into the ground. And then, if he judges that Roland won’t win his throw, he, Mordred, will step in. On behalf of the Crimson King, if it seems like a good idea, but really on his own behalf, and for his own reason, which is really quite simple: Mordred’s a-hungry.

  And if Roland and his ka-tet should win their throw? Win and press on to the Tower? Mordred doesn’t really think it will happen, for he is in his own strange way a member of their ka-tet, he shares their khef and feels what they do. He feels the impending break of their fellowship.

  Ka-shume! Mordred thinks, smiling. There’s a single eye left in the desert-dog’s face. One of the hairy black spider-legs caresses it and then plucks it out. Mordred eats it like a grape, then turns back to where the white light of the gas-lanterns spills around the corners of the blanket Roland has hung across the cave’s mouth.

  Could he go down closer? Close enough to listen?

  Mordred thinks he could, especially with the rising wind to mask the sound of his movements. An exciting idea.

  He scutters down the rocky slope toward the errant sparks of light, toward the murmur of the voice from the tape recorder and the thoughts of those listening: his brothers, his sister-mother, the pet billy, and, of course, overseeing them all, Big White Ka-Daddy.

  Mordred creeps as close as he dares and then crouches in the cold and windy dark, miserable and enjoying his misery, dreaming his outside dreams. Inside, beyond the blanket, is light. Let them have it, if they like; for now let there be light. Eventually he, Mordred, will put it out. And in the darkness, he will have his pleasure.

  Chapter VIII:

  Notes from

  the Gingerbread House

  One

  Eddie looked at the others. Jake and Roland were sitting on the sleeping-bags which had been left for them. Oy lay curled up at Jake’s feet. Susannah was parked comfortably on the seat of her Cruisin Trike. Eddie nodded, satisfied, and pushed the tape recorder’s PLAY button. The reels spun…there was silence…they spun…and silence…then, after clearing his throat, Ted Brautigan began to speak. They listened for over four hours, Eddie replacing each empty reel with the next full one, not bothering to rewind.

  No one suggested they stop, certainly not Roland, who listened with silent fascination even when his hip began to throb again. Roland thought he understood more, now; certainly he knew they had a real chance to stop what was happening in the compound below them. The knowledge frightened him because their chances of success were slim. The feeling of ka-shume made that clear. And one did not really understand the stakes until one glimpsed the goddess in her white robe, the bitch-goddess whose sleeve fell back to reveal her comely white arm as she beckoned: Come to me, run to me. Yes, it’s possible, you may gain your goal, you may win, so run to me, give me your whole heart. And if I break it? If one of you falls short, falls into the pit of coffah (the place your new friends call hell)? Too bad for you.

  Yes, if one of them fell into coffah and burned within sight of the fountains, that would be too bad, indeed. And the bitch in the white robe? Why, she’d only put her hands on her hips, and throw back her head, and laugh as the world ended. So much depended on the man whose weary, rational voice now filled the cave. The Dark Tower itself depended on him, for Brautigan was a man of staggering powers.

  The surprising thing was that the same could be said of Sheemie.

  Two

  “Test, one two…test, one two…test, test, test. This is Ted Stevens Brautigan and this is a test…”

  A brief pause. The reels turned, one full, the other now beginning to fill.

  “Okay, good. Great, in fact. I wasn’t sure this thing would work, especially here, but it seems fine. I prepared for this by trying to imagine you four—five, counting the boy’s little friend—listening to me, because I’ve always found visualization an excellent technique when preparing some sort of presentation. Unfortunately, in this case it doesn’t work. Sheemie can send me very good mental pictures—brilliant ones, in fact—but Roland is the only one of you he’s actually seen, and him not since the fall of Gilead, when both of them were very young. No disrespect, fellows, but I suspect the Roland now coming toward Thunderclap looks hardly anything like the young man my friend Sheemie so worshipped.

  “Where are you now, Roland? In Maine, looking for the writer? The one who also created me, after a fashion? In New York, looking for Eddie’s wife? Are any of you even still alive? I know the chances of you reaching Thunderclap aren’t good; ka is drawing you to the Devar-Toi, but a very powerful anti-ka, set in motion by the one you call the Crimson King, is working against you and your tet in a thousand ways. All the same…

  “Was it Emily Dickinson who called hope the thing with feathers? I can’t remember. There are a great many things I can’t remember any longer, but it seems I still remember how to fight. Maybe that’s a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing.

  “Has it crossed your mind to wonder where I’m recording this, lady and gentlemen?”

  It hadn’t. They simply sat, mesmerized by the slightly dusty sound of Brautigan’s voice, passing a bottle of Perrier and a tin filled with graham crackers back and forth.

  “I’ll tell you,” Brautigan went on, “partly because the three of you from America will surely find it amusing, but mostly because you may find it useful in formulating a plan to destroy what’s going on in Algul Siento.

  “As I speak, I’m sitting on a chair made of slab chocolate. The seat is a big blue marshmallow, and I doubt if the air mattresses we’re planning to leave you could be any more comfortable. You’d think such a seat would be sticky, but it’s not. The walls of this room—and the kitchen I can see if I look through the gumdrop arch to my left—are made of green, yellow, and red candy. Lick the green one and you taste lime. Lick the red one and you taste raspberry. Although taste (in any sense of that slippery word) had very little to do with Sheemie’s choices, or so I believe; I think he simply has a child’s love of bright primary colors.”

  Roland was nodding and smiling a little.

  “Although I must tell you,” the voice from the tape recorder said dryly, “I’d be happy to have at least one room with a slightly more reserved décor. Something in blue, perhaps. Earth-tones would be even better.

  “Speaking of earth tones, the stairs are also chocolate. The banister’s a candy-cane. One cannot, however, say ‘the stairs going up to the second floor,’ because there is no second floor. Through the window you can see cars that look suspiciously like bonbons going by, and the street itself looks like licorice. But if you open the door and take more than a single step toward Twizzler Avenue, you find yourself back where you started. In what we may as well call ‘the real world,’ for want of a better term.

  “Gingerbread House—which is what we call it because that’s what you always smell in here, warm gingerbread, just out of the oven—is as much Dinky’s creation as it is Sheemie’s. Dink
wound up in the Corbett House dorm with Sheemie, and heard Sheemie crying himself to sleep one night. A lot of people would have passed by on the other side in a case like that, and I realize that no one in the world looks less like the Good Samaritan than Dinky Earnshaw, but instead of passing by he knocked on the door of Sheemie’s suite and asked if he could come in.

  “Ask him about it now and Dinky will tell you it was no big deal. ‘I was new in the place, I was lonely, I wanted to make some friends,’ he’ll say. ‘Hearing a guy bawling like that, it hit me that he might want a friend, too.’ As though it were the most natural thing in the world. In a lot of places that might be true, but not in Algul Siento. And you need to understand that above all else, I think, if you’re going to understand us. So forgive me if I seem to dwell on the point.

  “Some of the hume guards call us morks, after a space alien in some television comedy. And morks are the most selfish people on Earth. Antisocial? Not exactly. Some are extremely social, but only insofar as it will get them what they currently want or need. Very few morks are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are morks, if you understand what I’m saying. The most famous, and thank God the low men never brought him over here, was a mass murderer named Ted Bundy.

  “If you have an extra cigarette or two, no one can be more sympathetic—or admiring—than a mork in need of a smoke. Once he’s got it, though, he’s gone.

  “Most morks—I’m talking ninety-eight or -nine out of a hundred—would have heard crying behind that closed door and never so much as slowed down on their way to wherever. Dinky knocked and asked if he could come in, even though he was new in the place and justifiably confused (he also thought he was going to be punished for murdering his previous boss, but that’s a story for another day).

  “And we should look at Sheemie’s side of it. Once again, I’d say ninety-eight or even ninety-nine morks out of a hundred would have responded to a question like that by shouting ‘Get lost!’ or even ‘Fuck off!’ Why? Because we are exquisitely aware that we’re different from most people, and that it’s a difference most people don’t like. Any more than the Neanderthals liked the first Cro-Magnons in the neighborhood, I would imagine. Morks don’t like to be caught off-guard.”