Dark Tower V, The Page 5

  “By hiring armed killers of our own,” Callahan replied.

  There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the Old Fella had lapsed into another language. At last Diego Adams said—cautiously, “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t,” the Old Fella said. “So listen and gain wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen and gain wisdom. Not six days’ ride nor’west of us, and bound southeast along the Path of the Beam, come three gunslingers and one ’prentice.” He smiled at their amazement. Then he turned to Slightman. “The ’prentice isn’t much older than your boy Ben, but he’s already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion. The others are quicker and deadlier by far. I have it from Andy, who’s seen them. You want hard calibers? They’re at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it.”

  This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned as if with a fever. His great pod of a belly trembled. “What children’s goodnight story is this?” he asked. “If there ever were such men, they passed out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years.”

  There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any kind. The crowd was still frozen, caught in the reverberation of that one mythic word: gunslingers.

  “You’re wrong,” Callahan said, “but we don’t need to fight over it. We can go and see for ourselves. A small party will do, I think. Jaffords here…myself…and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?”

  “There ain’t no gunslingers!” Overholser roared.

  Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. “Pere Callahan, God’s grace on you—”

  “—and you, Jorge.”

  “—but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty Wolves?”

  “Hear him, he speaks sense!” Eben Took, the storekeeper, called out.

  “And why would they fight for us?” Estrada continued. “We make it from year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few hot meals? And what man agrees to die for his dinner?”

  “Hear him, hear him!” Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.

  The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: “I have books in the rectory. Half a dozen.”

  Although most of them knew this, the thought of books—all that paper—still provoked a general sigh of wonder.

  “According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward. Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld.”

  “The Eld! The Eld!” the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers pointed. Hook em horns, the Old Fella thought. Go, Texas. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the smile that rose on his lips.

  “Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?” Telford asked in a gently mocking voice. “Surely you’re too old for such tales, Pere.”

  “Not hardcases,” Callahan said patiently, “gunslingers.”

  “How can three men stand against the Wolves, Pere?” Tian heard himself ask.

  According to Andy, one of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to, just the same). “That’s a question for their dinh, Tian. We’ll ask him. And they wouldn’t just be fighting for their suppers, you know. Not at all.”

  “What else, then?” Bucky Javier asked.

  Callahan thought they would want the thing that lay beneath the floorboards of his church. And that was good, because that thing had awakened. The Old Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem’s Lot in another world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn’t rid of it soon, it would kill him.

  Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.

  “In time, Mr. Javier,” Callahan said. “All in good time, sai.”

  Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along the benches from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.

  Gunslingers.

  Gunslingers to the west, come out of Mid-World.

  And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld’s last deadly children, moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a wind.

  “Time to be men,” Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without compassion. “Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true.”

  Part One

  Todash

  Chapter I:

  The Face on the Water

  One

  Time is a face on the water: this was a proverb from the long-ago, in far-off Mejis. Eddie Dean had never been there.

  Except he had, in a way. Roland had carried all four of his companions—Eddie, Susannah, Jake, Oy—to Mejis one night, storying long as they camped on I-70, the Kansas Turnpike in a Kansas that never was. That night he had told them the story of Susan Delgado, his first love. Perhaps his only love. And how he had lost her.

  The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as the world wound down like the main-spring in an ancient watch. Roland had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might be south west tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if time had gotten lost.

  They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the Mono. Blaine is a pain, Jake had said on several occasions, but he—or it—turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the Mono had been utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic (“Somethin you’re just naturally good at, sugar,” Susannah told him), and they had detrained in a Topeka which wasn’t quite part of the world from which Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had come. Which was good, really, because this world—one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team was called The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese car-maker was Takuro rather than Honda—had been overwhelmed by some sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone. So stick that in your Takuro Spirit and drive it, Eddie thought.

  The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this. During much of it he’d been scared shitless—he guessed all of them had been, except maybe for Roland—but yes, it had seemed real and clear. He’d not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even when they’d been walking up I-70 with bullets in their ears, looking at the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a thinny.

  But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake’s old friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland’s old friend (Flagg…or Marten…or—just perhaps—Maerlyn), time had changed.

  Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball…saw Roland kill his mother by mistake…and when we came back…

  Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing perhaps thirty miles from the Green Palace. They had still been able to see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world. Someone—or some force—had carried them over or through the thinny and back to the Path of the Beam. Whoever or whatever it had been, it had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch, complete with Nozz-A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of Keebler cookies.

  Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in the Palace: “Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning.” Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renoun
ce the Tower than he’d kill Jake’s pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce Roland’s Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.

  We got some daylight left, Eddie had said on the day they’d found Flagg’s warning note. You want to use it, or what?

  Yes, Roland of Gilead had replied. Let’s use it.

  And so they had, following the Path of the Beam through endless open fields that were divided from each other by belts of straggly, annoying underbrush. There had been no sign of people. Skies had remained low and cloudy day after day and night after night. Because they followed the Path of the Beam, the clouds directly above them sometimes roiled and broke open, revealing patches of blue, but never for long. One night they opened long enough to disclose a full moon with a face clearly visible on it: the nasty, complicitous squint-and-grin of the Peddler. That made it late summer by Roland’s reckoning, but to Eddie it looked like half-past no time at all, the grass mostly listless or outright dead, the trees (what few there were) bare, the bushes scrubby and brown. There was little game, and for the first time in weeks—since leaving the forest ruled by Shardik, the cyborg bear—they sometimes went to bed with their bellies not quite full.

  Yet none of that, Eddie thought, was quite as annoying as the sense of having lost hold of time itself: no hours, no days, no weeks, no seasons, for God’s sake. The moon might have told Roland it was the end of summer, but the world around them looked like the first week of November, dozing sleepily toward winter.

  Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.

  Had everything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to do but push Susannah’s wheelchair through one boring field after another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard’s Glass was what Jake called the Mystery Number, and that probably meant nothing. They’d needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of Lud in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the Mystery Number was a holdover from that. Eddie was far from sure she was right, but hey, it was a theory.

  And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun of his only real talent.

  Two

  They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks when they came to a pair of ancient double ruts that had surely once been a road. It didn’t follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland swung them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a road again might refocus things, help them to shake that maddening becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes feeling, but it didn’t. The road carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They finally topped a long north–south ridge. On the far side, their road descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale wood, Eddie thought as they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their second day in the forest (or maybe it was the third day…or the fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of vegetarian gunslinger burritos, but there were no orcs or trolls in the deep glades, and no elves—Keebler or otherwise. No more deer, either.

  “I keep lookin for the candy house,” Eddie said. They’d been winding their way through the great old trees for several days by then. Or maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they were still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it in the sky…and they could feel it.

  “What candy house is this?” Roland asked. “Is it another tale? If so, I’d hear.”

  Of course he would. The man was a glutton for stories, especially those that led off with a “Once upon a time when everyone lived in the forest.” But the way he listened was a little odd. A little off. Eddie had mentioned this to Susannah once, and she’d nailed it with a single stroke, as she often did. Susannah had a poet’s almost uncanny ability to put feelings into words, freezing them in place.

  “That’s cause he doesn’t listen all big-eyed like a kid at bedtime,” she said. “That’s just how you want him to listen, honeybunch.”

  “And how does he listen?”

  “Like an anthropologist,” she had replied promptly. “Like an anthropologist tryin to figure out some strange culture by their myths and legends.”

  She was right. And if Roland’s way of listening made Eddie uncomfortable, it was probably because in his heart, Eddie felt that if anyone should be listening like scientists, it should be him and Suze and Jake. Because they came from a far more sophisticated where and when. Didn’t they?

  Whether they did or didn’t, the four had discovered a great number of stories that were common to both worlds. Roland knew a tale called “Diana’s Dream” that was eerily close to “The Lady or the Tiger,” which all three exiled New Yorkers had read in school. The tale of Lord Perth was similar to the Bible story of David and Goliath. Roland had heard many tales of the Man Jesus, who died on the cross to redeem the sins of the world, and told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake that Jesus had His fair share of followers in Mid-World. There were also songs common to both worlds. “Careless Love” was one. “Hey Jude” was another, although in Roland’s world, the first line of this song was “Hey Jude, I see you, lad.”

  Eddie passed at least an hour telling Roland the story of Hansel and Gretel, turning the wicked child-eating witch into Rhea of the Cöos almost without thinking of it. When he got to the part about her trying to fatten the children up, he broke off and asked Roland: “Do you know this one? A version of this one?”

  “No,” Roland said, “but it’s a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please.”

  Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after, and the gunslinger nodded. “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Jake said.

  Oy was trotting at the boy’s heel, looking up at Jake with the usual expression of calm adoration in his gold-ringed eyes. “Yeah,” the bumbler said, copying the boy’s rather glum inflection exactly.

  Eddie threw an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Too bad you’re over here instead of back in New York,” he said. “If you were back in the Apple, Jakey-boy, you’d probably have your own child psychiatrist by now. You’d be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the heart of your unresolved conflicts. Maybe getting some good drugs, too. Ritalin, stuff like that.”

  “On the whole, I’d rather be here,” Jake said, and looked down at Oy.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “I don’t blame you.”

  “Such stories are called ‘fairy tales,’ ” Roland mused.

  “Yeah,” Eddie replied.

  “There were no fairies in this one, though.”

  “No,” Eddie agreed. “That’s more like a category name than anything else. In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories…your science fiction stories…your Westerns…your fairy tales. Get it?”

  “Yes,” Roland said. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?”

  “I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said.

  “Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked.

  “Somet
imes at supper, I guess,” Eddie said, “but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don’t let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda boring when you put it that way.”

  “How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?”

  With no hesitation—and certainly no collusion—Eddie, Susannah, and Jake all said the same word at exactly the same time: “Nineteen!” And a moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: “Nie-teen!”

  They looked at each other and laughed, because “nineteen” had become a kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing “bumhug,” which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen. Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way, somehow.

  Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen. Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.

  Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie had once believed in lightbulbs and Double-A batteries, had a tendency to dismiss his ka-tet’s odd and sudden infatuation with the number. They had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had a tendency to spread among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating this to a certain degree.

  “You’ve got the touch, Jake,” he said. “I’m not sure that it’s as strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain, but by the gods I believe it may be.”