The Dark Tower VII Read online

A gray-haired gentleman—another bankerly-looking fellow, in truth—stepped forward. He was wearing gray suit-pants, a white shirt open at the collar, and a gray vest, also open. The vest sagged. So did the man wearing it.

  “You’ve taken our lives from us,” he said. He spoke these words with a kind of morose satisfaction—as if he’d always known it would come to this (or something like this). “The lives we knew. What will you give back in return, Mr. Gilead?”

  There was a rumble of approval at this. Jake Chambers heard it and was suddenly more angry than ever before in his life. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, stole to the handle of the Coyote machine-pistol, caressed it, and found a cold comfort in its shape. Even a brief respite from grief. And Roland knew, for he reached behind him without looking and put his hand on top of Jake’s. He squeezed until Jake let loose of the gun.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll give, since you ask,” Roland said. “I meant to have this place, where you have fed on the brains of helpless children in order to destroy the universe, burned to the ground; aye, every stick of it. I intended to set certain flying balls that have come into our possession to explode, and blow apart anything that would not burn. I intended to point you the way to the River Whye and the green Callas which lie beyond it, and set you on with a curse my father taught me: may you live long, but not in good health.”

  A resentful murmur greeted this, but not an eye met Roland’s own. The man who had agreed to speak for them (and even in his rage, Jake gave him points for courage) was swaying on his feet, as if he might soon faint away.

  “The Callas still lie in that direction,” Roland said, and pointed. “If you go, some—many, even—may die on the way, for there are animals out there that are hungry, and what water there is may be poison. I’ve no doubt the Calla-folken will know who you are and what you’ve been about even if you lie, for they have the Manni among them and the Manni see much. Yet you may find forgiveness there rather than death, for the capacity for forgiveness in the hearts of such people is beyond the capacity of hearts such as yours to understand. Or mine, for that matter.

  “That they would put you to work and that the rest of your lives would pass not in the comfort you’ve known but in toil and sweat I have no doubt, yet I urge you to go, if only to find some redemption for what you have done.”

  “We didn’t know what we were doing, ye chary man!” a woman in the back yelled furiously.

  “YOU KNEW!” Jake shouted back, screaming so loudly that he saw black dots in front of his eyes, and Roland’s hand was once again instantly over his to stay his draw. Would he actually have sprayed the crowd with the Coyote, bringing more death to this terrible place? He didn’t know. What he did know was that a gunslinger’s hands were sometimes not under his control once a weapon was in them. “Don’t you dare say you didn’t! You knew!”

  “I’ll give this much, may it do ya,” Roland said. “My friends and I—those who survive, although I’m sure the one who lies dead yonder would agree, which is why I speak as I do—will let this place stand. There’s food enough to see you through the rest of your lives, I have no doubt, and robots to cook it and wash your clothes and even wipe your asses, if that’s what you think you need. If you prefer purgatory to redemption, then stay here. Were I you, I’d make the trek instead. Follow the railroad tracks out of the shadows. Tell them what you did before they can tell you, and get on your knees with your heads bared, and beg their forgiveness.”

  “Never!” someone shouted adamantly, but Jake thought some of the others looked unsure.

  “As you will,” said Roland. “I’ve spoken my last word on it, and the next who speaks back to me may remain silent ever after, for one of my friends is preparing another, her husband, to lie in the ground and I am full of grief and rage. Would you speak more? Would you dare my rage? If so, you dare this.” He drew his gun and laid it in the hollow of his shoulder. Jake stepped up beside him, at last drawing his own.

  There was a moment of silence, and then the man who had spoken turned away.

  “Don’t shoot us, mister, you’ve done enough,” someone said bitterly.

  Roland made no reply and the crowd began to disperse. Some went running, and the others caught that like a cold. They fled in silence, except for a few who were weeping, and soon the dark had swallowed them up.

  “Wow,” Dinky said. His voice was soft and respectful.

  “Roland,” Ted said. “What they did wasn’t entirely their fault. I thought I had explained that, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”

  Roland holstered his revolver. “You did an excellent job,” he said. “That’s why they’re still alive.”

  Now they had the Damli House end of the Mall to themselves again, and Sheemie limped up to Roland. His eyes were round and solemn. “Will you show me where you’d go, dear?” he asked. “Can you show me the place?”

  The place. Roland had been so fixed on the when that he’d scarcely thought of the where. And his memories of the road they had traveled in Lovell were pretty skimpy. Eddie had been driving John Cullum’s car, and Roland had been deep in his own thoughts, concentrating on the things he would say to convince the caretaker to help them.

  “Did Ted show you a place before you sent him on?” he asked Sheemie.

  “Aye, so he did. Only he didn’t know he was showing me. It was a baby-picture…I don’t know how to tell you, exactly…stupid head! Full of cobwebbies!” Sheemie made a fist and clouted himself between the eyes.

  Roland took the hand before Sheemie could hit himself again and unrolled the fingers. He did this with surprising gentleness. “No, Sheemie. I think I understand. You found a thought…a memory from when he was a little boy.”

  Ted had come over to them. “Of course that must be it,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before now. Too simple, maybe. I grew up in Milford, and the place where I came out in 1960 was barely a spit from there in geographical terms. Sheemie must have found a memory of a carriage-ride, or maybe a trip on the Hartford Trolley to see my Uncle Jim and Aunt Molly in Bridgeport. Something in my subconscious.” He shook his head. “I knew the place where I came out looked familiar, but of course it was years later. The Merritt Parkway wasn’t there when I was a boy.”

  “Can you show me a picture like that?” Sheemie asked Roland hopefully.

  Roland thought once more of the place in Lovell where they’d parked on Route 7, the place where he’d called Chevin of Chayven out of the woods, but it simply wasn’t sure enough; there was no landmark that made the place only itself and no other. Not one that he remembered, anyway.

  Then another idea came. One that had to do with Eddie.

  “Sheemie!”

  “Aye, Roland of Gilead, Will Dearborn that was!”

  Roland reached out and placed his hands on the sides of Sheemie’s head. “Close your eyes, Sheemie, son of Stanley.”

  Sheemie did as he was told, then reached out his own hands and grasped the sides of Roland’s head. Roland closed his own eyes.

  “See what I see, Sheemie,” he said. “See where we would go. See it very well.”

  And Sheemie did.

  Eighteen

  While they stood there, Roland projecting and Sheemie seeing, Dani Rostov softly called to Jake.

  Once he was before her she hesitated, as if unsure what she would say or do. He began to ask her, but before he could, she stopped his mouth with a kiss. Her lips were amazingly soft.

  “That’s for good luck,” she said, and when she saw his look of amazement and understood the power of what she had done, her timidity lessened. She put her arms around his neck (still holding her scuffed Pooh Bear in one hand; he felt it soft against his back) and did it again. He felt the push of her tiny, hard breasts and would remember the sensation for the rest of his life. Would remember her for the rest of his life.

  “And that’s for me.” She retreated to Ted Brautigan’s side, eyes downcast and cheeks burning red, before he could speak. Not t
hat he could have, even if his life had depended upon it. His throat was locked shut.

  Ted looked at him and smiled. “You judge the rest of them by the first one,” he said. “Take it from me. I know.”

  Jake could still say nothing. She might have punched him in the head instead of kissing him on the lips. He was that dazed.

  Nineteen

  Fifteen minutes later, four men, one girl, a billy-bumbler, and one dazed, amazed (and very tired) boy stood on the Mall. They seemed to have the grassy quad to themselves; the rest of the Breakers had disappeared completely. From where he stood, Jake could see the lighted window on the first floor of Corbett Hall where Susannah was tending to her man. Thunder rumbled. Ted spoke now as he had in Thundercap Station’s office closet, where the red blazer’s brass tag read HEAD OF SHIPPING, back when Eddie’s death had been unthinkable: “Join hands. And concentrate.”

  Jake started to reach for Dani Rostov’s hand, but Dinky shook his head, smiling a little. “Maybe you can hold hands with her another day, hero, but right now you’re the monkey in the middle. And your dinh’s another one.”

  “You hold hands with each other,” Sheemie said. There was a quiet authority in his voice that Jake hadn’t heard before. “That’ll help.”

  Jake tucked Oy into his shirt. “Roland, were you able to show Sheemie—”

  “Look,” Roland said, taking his hands. The others now made a tight circle around them. “Look. I think you’ll see.”

  A brilliant seam opened in the darkness, obliterating Sheemie and Ted from Jake’s view. For a moment it trembled and darkened, and Jake thought it would disappear. Then it grew bright again and spread wider. He heard, very faintly (the way you heard things when you were underwater), the sound of a car or truck passing in that other world. And saw a building with a small asphalt lot in front of it. Three cars and a pickup truck were parked there.

  Daylight! he thought, dismayed. Because if time never ran backward in the Keystone World, that meant that time had slipped. If that was Keystone World, then it was Saturday, the nineteenth of June, in the year—

  “Quick!” Ted shouted from the other side of that brilliant hole in reality. “If you’re going, go now! He’s going to faint! If you’re going—”

  Roland yanked Jake forward, his purse bouncing on his back as he did so.

  Wait! Jake wanted to shout. Wait, I forgot my stuff!

  But it was too late. There was the sensation of big hands squeezing his chest, and he felt all the air whoosh out of his lungs. He thought, Pressure change. There was a sensation of falling up and then he was reeling onto the pavement of the parking lot with his shadow tacked to his heels, squinting and grimacing, wondering in some distant part of his mind how long it had been since his eyes had been exposed to plain old natural daylight. Not since entering the Doorway Cave in pursuit of Susannah, maybe.

  Very faintly he heard someone—he thought it was the girl who had kissed him—call Good luck, and then it was gone. Thunderclap was gone, and the Devar-Toi, and the darkness. They were America-side, in the parking lot of the place to which Roland’s memory and Sheemie’s power—boosted by the other four Breakers—had taken them. It was the East Stoneham General Store, where Roland and Eddie had been ambushed by Jack Andolini. Only unless there had been some horrible error, that had been twenty-two years earlier. This was June 19th of 1999, and the clock in the window (IT’S ALWAYS TIME FOR BOAR’S HEAD MEATS! was written in a circle around the face) said it was nineteen minutes of four in the afternoon.

  Time was almost up.

  Chapter I:

  Mrs. Tassenbaum

  Drives South

  One

  The fact of his own almost unearthly speed of hand never occurred to Jake Chambers. All he knew was that when he staggered out of the Devar-Toi and back into America, his shirt—belled out into a pregnant curve by Oy’s weight—was pulling out of his jeans. The bumbler, who never had much luck when it came to passing between the worlds (he’d nearly been squashed by a taxicab the last time), tumbled free. Almost anyone else in the world would have been unable to prevent that fall (and in fact it very likely wouldn’t have hurt Oy at all), but Jake wasn’t almost anyone. Ka had wanted him so badly that it had even found its way around death to put him at Roland’s side. Now his hands shot out with a speed so great that they momentarily blurred away to nothing. When they reappeared, one was curled into the thick shag at the nape of Oy’s neck and the other into the shorter fur at the rump end of his long back. Jake set his friend down on the pavement. Oy looked up at him and gave a single short bark. It seemed to express not one idea but two: thanks, and don’t do that again.

  “Come on,” Roland said. “We have to hurry.”

  Jake followed him toward the store, Oy falling in at his accustomed place by the boy’s left heel. There was a sign hanging in the door from a little rubber suction cup. It read WE’RE OPEN, SO COME IN N VISIT, just as it had in 1977. Taped in the window to the left of the door was this:

  COME ONE COME ALL

  TO THE

  1st CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

  BEANHOLE BEAN SUPPER

  Saturday June 19th, 1999

  Intersection Route 7 & Klatt Road

  PARISH HOUSE (In Back)

  5 PM–7:30 PM

  AT 1st CONGO

  “WE’RE ALWAYS GLAD TO SEEYA, NAYBAH!”

  Jake thought, The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They’ll already be putting down the tablecloths and setting the places.

  Taped to the right of the door was a more startling message to the public:

  1st Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins

  Will YOU join us for Worship?

  Sunday services: 10 AM

  Thursday services: 7 PM

  EVERY WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7–9 PM!

  Games! Music! Scripture!

  ***AND***

  NEWS OF WALK-INS!

  Hey, Teens!

  “Be There or Be Square!!!”

  “We Seek the Doorway to Heaven—Will You Seek With Us?”

  Jake found himself thinking of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might have been attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but his heart—

  “Hurry, Jake,” Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the door. Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of Took’s on the Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things nice.

  He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least two things with him, after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, and the bag of Orizas was still slung over his shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a dozen plates remaining inside would be within easy reach of his right hand.

  Two

  Wendell “Chip” McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the door rang, once more turning Chip’s life upside down (You’ve turned turtle, the oldtimers used to say when your car rolled in the ditch), they had been discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on Keywadin Pond…or rather Mrs. Tassenbaum had been discussing it.

  Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot. She could afford a cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That D
ay in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda…he supposed…if you didn’t mind the makeup and the hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt perfectly justified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale…a trick he had learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try doing that in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine feet high. This wasn’t February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum—a Daughter of Abraham if he had ever seen one—was not from these parts. No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfectly comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he hadn’t entirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pussy than a toilet seat.

  “And now Gore expects to just…ride in on his coattails!” Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). “Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who really did invent the Internet!” She looked up (Chip’s thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and gave Chip a roguish little smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two register. “I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!”