Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7) Read online

  “How can you know that?” the boy called Jake shouted at the man—his father, she assumed. “How can you be so fucking sure?”

  Instead of answering the kid’s question, the one called Roland looked at her. Mrs. Tassenbaum felt the skin of her arms and back break out in gooseflesh.

  “Drive down, sai, may it do ya.”

  She looked doubtfully at the steep slope of the Cara Laughs driveway. “If I do, I might not get this bucket of bolts back up.”

  “You’ll have to,” Roland said.

  NINE

  The man cutting the grass was King’s bondservant, Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He was white-haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing his years with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to the house, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn the mower off. He also removed his hat—without being exactly aware that he was doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at Roland’s hip, and widened enough to make the crow’s-feet around them disappear.

  “Howdy, mister,” he said cautiously. He thinks I’m a walk-in, Roland thought. Just as she did.

  And they were walkins of a sort, he and Jake; they just happened to have come to a time and place where such things were common.

  And where time was racing.

  Roland spoke before the man could go on. “Where are they? Where is he? Stephen King? Speak, man, and tell me the truth!”

  The hat slipped from the old man’s relaxing fingers and fell beside his feet on the newly cut grass. His hazel eyes stared into Roland’s, fascinated: the bird looking at the snake.

  “Fambly’s across the lake, at that place they gut on t’other side,” he said. “T’old Schindler place. Havin some kind of pa’ty, they are. Steve said he’d drive over after his walk.” And he gestured to a small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just visible around the side of the house.

  “Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell this lady!”

  The old man looked briefly over Roland’s shoulder, then back to the gunslinger. “Be easier was I t’drive ya there m’self.”

  Roland considered this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they’d found the woman in ka’s road. However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn’t he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to play in their story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but.

  All of this crossed his consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.

  “No,” he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Tell her. Now.”

  TEN

  The boy — Jake — had fallen back against the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into the kid’s face, but the kid didn’t see him. His eyes were closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he’d fainted.

  “Son? … Jake?”

  “I have him,” the boy said without opening his eyes. “Not Stephen King—I can’t touch him—but the other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?”

  Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husband enough at work — holding long, muttered dialogues with himself— to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn’t Stephen King. Which left about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking.

  Nevertheless, she did answer, because she knew what always slowed her down.

  “Too bad he doesn’t need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  ELEVEN

  Strawberries aren’t out in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine Anderson (of Maybrook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are walking along the side of Route 7 (which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg Road) with their plastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at least half a mile along the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a hundred years ago, and it is to Garrett’s great-grandson that Roland Deschain of Gilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, do ya not kennit.

  The two women have enjoyed their hour’s walk, not because either of them has any great love of raspberries (Justine reckons she won’t even eat hers; the seeds get caught in her teeth) but because it’s given them a chance to catch up on their respective families and to laugh a little together about the years when their friendship was new and probably the most important thing in either girl’s life. They met at Vassar College (a thousand years ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together at graduation the year they were juniors. This is what they are talking about when the blue minivan—it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan, Justine recognizes the make and model because her oldest son had one just like it when his tribe started growing—comes around the curve by Melder’s German Restaurant and Brathaus. It’s all over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming up dust from the southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar and spuming up more from the northbound one. The second time it does this—rolling toward them now, and coming at a pretty damned good clip—Justine thinks it may actually go into the ditch and turn over (“turn turtle,” they used to say back in the forties, when she and Elvira had been at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back on the road just before that can happen.

  “Look out, that person’s drunk or something!” Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back, but they find their way blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The thorns catch at their slacks ( thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts, Justine will think later … when she has time to think) and pull out little puffs of cloth.

  Justine is thinking she should put an arm around her friend’s shoulder and tumble them both over the thigh-high wall—do a backflip, just like in gym class all those years ago—but before she can make up her mind to do it, the blue van is by them, and at the moment it passes, it’s more or less on the road and not a danger to them.

  Justine watches it go by in a muffled blare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her chest, the taste of something her body has dumped—adrenaline would be the most likely possibility—flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill the little blue van once again lurches across the white line. The driver corrects the drift …no, overcorrects . Once more the blue van is on the righthand shoulder, spuming up yellow dust for fifty yards.

  “Gosh, I hope Stephen King sees that asshole,” Elvira says. They have passed the writer half a mile or so back, and said hello. Probably everyone in town has seen him on his afternoon walk, at one time or another.

  As if the driver of the blue van has heard Elvira Toothaker call him an asshole, the van’s brakelights flare. The van suddenly pulls all the way off the road and stops. When the door opens, the ladies hear a louder blast of rock and roll music. They also hear the driver—a man—yelling at someone (Elvira and Justine just pity the person stuck driving with that guy on such a beautiful June afternoon). “You leave ’at alone!” he shouts. “That ain’t yoahs, y’hear?” And then the driver reaches back into the van, brings out a cane, and uses it to help him over the rock wall and into the bushes. The van sits rumbling on the soft shoulder, driver’s door open, emitting blue exhaust from one end and rock from the other.

  “What’s he doing?” Justine asks, a little nervously.

  “Taking a leak would be my guess,” her friend replies. “But if Mr. King back there is lucky, maybe doing Number Two, instead. That might give him time to get off Route 7 and back onto Turtleback Lane.”
/>   Suddenly Justine doesn’t feel like picking berries anymore. She wants to go back home and have a strong cup of tea.

  The man comes limping briskly out of the bushes and uses his cane to help him back over the rock wall.

  “I guess he didn’t need to Number Two,” Elvira says, and as the bad driver climbs back into his blue van, the two going-on-old women look at each other and burst into giggles.

  TWELVE

  Roland watched the old man give the woman instructions— something about using Warrington’s Road as a shortcut—and then Jake opened his eyes. To Roland the boy looked unutterably weary.

  “I was able to make him stop and take a leak,” he said. “Now he’s fixing something behind his seat. I don’t know what it is, but it won’t keep him busy for long. Roland, this is bad. We’re awfully late. We have to go.”

  Roland looked at the woman, hoping that his decision not to replace her behind the wheel with the old man had been the right one. “Do you know where to go? Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Up Warrington’s to Route 7. We sometimes go to dinner at Warrington’s. I know that road.”

  “Can’t guarantee you’ll cut his path goin that way,” said the caretaker, “but it seems likely.” He bent down to pick up his hat and began to brush bits of freshly cut grass from it. He did this with long, slow strokes, like a man caught in a dream. “Ayuh, seems likely t’me.” And then, still like a man who dreams awake, he tucked his hat beneath his arm, raised a fist to his forehead, and bent a leg to the stranger with the big revolver on his hip. Why would he not?

  The stranger was surrounded by white light.

  THIRTEEN

  When Roland pulled himself back into the cab of the storekeeper’s truck—a chore made more difficult by the rapidly escalating pain in his right hip—his hand came down on Jake’s leg, and just like that he knew what Jake had been keeping back, and why. He had been afraid that knowing might cause the gunslinger’s focus to drift. It was not kashume the boy had felt, or Roland would have felt it, too. How could there be kashume among them, with the tet already broken? Their special power, something greater than all of them, perhaps drawn from the Beam itself, was gone. Now they were just three friends (four, counting the bumbler) united by a single purpose. And they could save King. Jake knew it. They could save the writer and come a step closer to saving the Tower by doing so. But one of them was going to die doing it.

  Jake knew that, too.

  FOURTEEN

  An old saying—one taught to him by his father—came to Roland then: If ka will say so, let it be so. Yes; all right; let it be so.

  During the long years he had spent on the trail of the man in black, the gunslinger would have sworn nothing in the universe could have caused him to renounce the Tower; had he not literally killed his own mother in pursuit of it, back at the start of his terrible career? But in those years he had been friendless, childless, and (he didn’t like to admit it, but it was true) heartless. He had been bewitched by that cold romance the loveless mistake for love. Now he had a son and he had been given a second chance and he had changed. Knowing that one of them must die in order to save the writer—that their fellowship must be reduced again, and so soon—would not make him cry off. But he would make sure that Roland of Gilead, not Jake of New York, provided the sacrifice this time.

  Did the boy know that he’d penetrated his secret? No time to worry about that now.

  Roland slammed the truckomobile’s door shut and looked at the woman. “Is your name Irene?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Drive, Irene. Do it as if Lord High Splitfoot were on your trail with rape on his mind, do ya I beg. Out Warrington’s Road. If we don’t see him there, out the Seven-Road. Will you?”

  “You’re fucking right,” said Mrs. Tassenbaum, and shoved the gearshift into First with real authority.

  The engine screamed, but the truck began to roll backward, as if so frightened by the job ahead that it would rather finish up in the lake. Then she engaged the clutch and the old International Harvester leaped ahead, charging up the steep incline of the driveway and leaving a trail of blue smoke and burnt rubber behind.

  Garrett McKeen’s great-grandson watched them go with his mouth hanging open. He had no idea what had just happened, but he felt sure that a great deal depended on what would happen next.

  Maybe everything.

  FIFTEEN

  Needing to piss that bad was weird, because pissing was the last thing Bryan Smith had done before leaving the Million Dollar Campground. And once he’d clambered over the fucking rock wall, he hadn’t been able to manage more than a few drops, even though it had felt like a real bladder-buster at the time. Bryan hopes he’s not going to have trouble with his prostrate; trouble with the old prostrate is the last thing he needs. He’s got enough other problems, by the hairy old Jesus.

  Oh well, now that he’s stopped he might as well try to fix the Styrofoam cooler behind the seat—the dogs are still staring at it with their tongues hanging out. He tries to wedge it underneath the seat, but it won’t go—there’s not quite enough clearance. What he does instead is to point a dirty finger at his rotties and tell them again to ne’mine the cooler and the meat inside, that’s his, that’s gonna be his suppah. This time he even thinks to add a promise that later on he’ll mix a little of the hamburger in with their Purina, if they’re good. This is fairly deep thinking for Bryan Smith, but the simple expedient of swinging the cooler up front and putting it in the unoccupied passenger seat never occurs to him.

  “You leave it alone !” he tells them again, and hops back behind the wheel. He slams the door, takes a brief glance in the rearview mirror, sees two old ladies back there (he didn’t notice them before because he wasn’t exactly looking at the road when he passed them), gives them a wave they never see through the Caravan’s filthy rear window, and then pulls back onto Route 7. Now the radio is playing “Gangsta Dream 19,” by Owt-Ray-Juss, and Bryan turns it up (once more swerving across the white line and into the northbound lane as he does so—this is the sort of person who simply cannot fix the radio without looking at it). Rap rules! And metal rules, too! All he needs now to make his day complete is a tune by Ozzy—“Crazy Train” would be good.

  And some of those Marses bars.

  SIXTEEN

  Mrs. Tassenbaum came bolting out of the Cara Laughs driveway and onto Turtleback Lane in second gear, the old pickup truck’s engine overcranking (if there’d been an RPM gauge on the dashboard, the needle would undoubtedly have been red-lining), the few tools in the back tapdancing crazily in the rusty bed.

  Roland had only a bit of the touch—hardly any at all, compared to Jake—but he had met Stephen King, and taken him down into the false sleep of hypnosis. That was a powerful bond to share, and so he wasn’t entirely surprised when he touched the mind Jake hadn’t been able to reach. It probably didn’t hurt that King was thinking about them.

  He often does on his walks, Roland thought. When he’s alone, he hears the Song of the Turtle and knows that he has a job to do. One he’s shirking. Well, my friend, that ends today.

  If, that was, they could save him.

  He leaned past Jake and looked at the woman. “Can’t you make this gods-cursed thing go faster?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe I can.” And then, to Jake: “Can you really read minds, son, or is that only a game you and your friend play?”

  “I can’t read them, exactly, but I can touch them,” Jake said.

  “I hope to hell that’s the truth,” she said, “because Turtleback’s hilly and only one lane wide in places. If you sense someone coming the other way, you have to let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “Excellent,” said Irene Tassenbaum. She bared her teeth in a grin. Really, there was no longer any doubt: this was the best thing that had ever happened to her. The most exciting thing. Now, as well as hearing those singing voices, she could see faces in the leaves of the tree
s on the sides of the road, as if they were being watched by a multitude. She could feel some tremendous force gathering all around them, and she was possessed by a sudden giddy notion: that if she floored the gaspedal of Chip McAvoy’s old rusty pickup, it might go faster than the speed of light. Powered by the energy she sensed around them, it might outrace time itself.

  Well, let’s just see about that, she thought. She swung the I-H into the middle of Turtleback Lane, then punched the clutch and yanked the gearshift into Third. The old truck didn’t go faster than the speed of light, and it didn’t outrace time, but the speedometer needle climbed to fifty … and then past. The truck crested a hill, and when it started down the other side it flew briefly into the air.

  At least someone was happy; Irene Tassenbaum shouted in excitement.

  SEVENTEEN

  Stephen King takes two walks, the short one and the long one. The short one takes him out to the intersection of Warrington’s Road and Route 7, then back to his house, Cara Laughs, the same way. That one is three miles. The long walk (which also happens to be the name of a book he once wrote under the Bachman name, back before the world moved on) takes him past the Warrington’s intersection, down Route 7 as far as the Slab City Road, then all the way back Route 7 to Berry Hill, bypassing Warrington’s Road. This walk returns him to his house by way of the north end of Turtleback Lane, and is four miles. This is the one he means to take today, but when he gets back to the intersection of 7 and Warrington’s he stops, playing with the idea of going back the short way. He’s always careful about walking on the shoulder of the public road, though traffic is light on Route 7, even in summer; the only time this highway ever gets busy is when the Fryeburg Fair’s going on, and that doesn’t start until the first week of October. Most of the sightlines are good, anyway. If a bad driver’s coming (or a drunk) you can usually spot him half a mile away, which gives you plenty of time to vacate the area. There’s only one blind hill, and that’s the one directly beyond the Warrington’s intersection. Yet that’s also an aerobic hill, one that gets the old heart really pumping, and isn’t that what he’s doing all these stupid walks for? To promote what the TV talking heads call “heart healthiness?” He’s quit drinking, he’s quit doping, he’s almost quit smoking, he exercises. What else is there?