Dark Tower V, The Read online

  Then he is falling.

  Seventeen

  Callahan stopped and looked at Jake, almost shyly. “Do you remember it?” He asked. “The actual…” He cleared his throat. “The dying?”

  Jake nodded gravely. “You don’t?”

  “I remember looking at Michigan Avenue from between my new shoes. I remember the sensation of standing there—seeming to, anyway—in the middle of a snow flurry. I remember Sayre behind me, yelling in some other language. Cursing. Words that guttural just about had to be curses. And I remember thinking, He’s frightened. That was actually my last thought, that Sayre was frightened. Then there was an interval of darkness. I floated. I could hear the chimes, but they were distant. Then they came closer. As if they were mounted on some engine that was rushing toward me at terrible speed.

  “There was light. I saw light in the darkness. I thought I was having the Kübler-Ross death experience, and I went toward it. I didn’t care where I came out, as long as it wasn’t on Michigan Avenue, all smashed and bleeding, with a crowd standing around me. But I didn’t see how that could happen. You don’t fall thirty-three stories, then regain consciousness.

  “And I wanted to get away from the chimes. They kept getting louder. My eyes started to water. My ears hurt. I was glad I still had eyes and ears, but the chimes made any gratitude I might have felt pretty academic.

  “I thought, I have to get into the light, and I lunged for it. I…”

  Eighteen

  He opens his eyes, but even before he does, he is aware of a smell. It’s the smell of hay, but very faint, almost exhausted. A ghost of its former self, you might say. And he? Is he a ghost?

  He sits up and looks around. If this is the afterlife, then all the holy books of the world, including the one from which he himself used to preach, are wrong. Because he’s not in heaven or hell; he’s in a stable. There are white wisps of ancient straw on the floor. There are cracks in the board walls through which brilliant light streams. It’s the light he followed out of the darkness, he thinks. And he thinks, It’s desert light. Is there any concrete reason to think so? Perhaps. The air is dry when he pulls it into his nostrils. It’s like drawing the air of a different planet.

  Maybe it is, he thinks. Maybe this is the Planet Afterlife.

  The chimes are still there, both sweet and horrible, but now fading…fading…and gone. He hears the faint snuffle of hot wind. Some of it finds its way through the gaps between the boards, and a few bits of straw lift off from the floor, do a tired little dance, then settle back.

  Now there is another noise. An arrhythmic thudding noise. Some machine, and not in the best of shape, from the sound. He stands up. It’s hot in here, and sweat breaks immediately on his face and hands. He looks down at himself and sees his fine new Grand River Menswear clothes are gone. He is now wearing jeans and a blue chambray shirt, faded thin from many washings. On his feet is a pair of battered boots with rundown heels. They look like they have walked many a thirsty mile. He bends and feels his legs for breaks. There appear to be none. Then his arms. None. He tries snapping his fingers. They do the job easily, making little dry sounds like breaking twigs.

  He thinks: Was my whole life a dream? Is this the reality? If so, who am I and what am I doing here?

  And from the deeper shadows behind him comes that weary cycling sound: thud-THUD-thud-THUD-thud-THUD.

  He turns in that direction, and gasps at what he sees. Standing behind him in the middle of the abandoned stable is a door. It’s set into no wall, only stands free. It has hinges, but as far as he can see they connect the door to nothing but air. Hieroglyphs are etched upon it halfway up. He cannot read them. He steps closer, as if that would aid understanding. And in a way it does. Because he sees that the doorknob is made of crystal, and etched upon it is a rose. He has read his Thomas Wolfe: a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door. There’s no stone, but perhaps that is the meaning of the hieroglyph.

  No, he thinks. No, the word is UNFOUND. Maybe I’m the stone.

  He reaches out and touches the crystal knob. As though it were a signal

  (a sigul, he thinks)

  the thudding machinery ceases. Very faint, very distant—far and wee—he hears the chimes. He tries the knob. It moves in neither direction. There’s not even the slightest give. It might as well be set in concrete. When he takes his hand away, the sound of the chimes ceases.

  He walks around the door and the door is gone. Walks the rest of the way around and it’s back. He makes three slow circles, noting the exact point at which the thickness of the door disappears on one side and reappears on the other. He reverses his course, now going widder-shins. Same deal. What the hell?

  He looks at the door for several moments, pondering, then walks deeper into the stable, curious about the machine he heard. There’s no pain when he walks, if he just took a long fall his body hasn’t yet got the news, but Kee-rist is it ever hot in here!

  There are horse stalls, long abandoned. There’s a pile of ancient hay, and beside it a neatly folded blanket and what looks like a breadboard. On the board is a single scrap of dried meat. He picks it up, sniffs it, smells salt. Jerky, he thinks, and pops it into his mouth. He’s not very worried about being poisoned. How can you poison a man who’s already dead?

  Chewing, he continues his explorations. At the rear of the stable is a small room like an afterthought. There are a few chinks in the walls of this room, too, enough for him to see a machine squatting on a concrete pad. Everything in the stable whispers of long years and abandonment, but this gadget, which looks sort of like a milking machine, appears brand new. No rust, no dust. He goes closer. There’s a chrome pipe jutting from one side. Beneath it is a drain. The steel collar around it looks damp. On top of the machine is a small metal plate. Next to the plate is a red button. Stamped on the plate is this:

  LaMERK INDUSTRIES

  834789-AA-45-776019

  DO NOT REMOVE SLUG

  ASK FOR ASSISTANCE

  The red button is stamped with the word ON. Callahan pushes it. The weary thudding sound resumes, and after a moment water gushes from the chrome pipe. He puts his hands under it. The water is numbingly cold, shocking his overheated skin. He drinks. The water is neither sweet nor sour and he thinks, Such things as taste must be forgotten at great depths. This—

  “Hello, Faddah.”

  Callahan screams in surprise. His hands fly up and for a moment jewels of water sparkle in a dusty sunray falling between two shrunken boards. He wheels around on the eroded heels of his boots. Standing just outside the door of the pump-room is a man in a hooded robe.

  Sayre, he thinks. It’s Sayre, he’s followed me, he came through that damn door—

  “Calm down,” says the man in the robe. “ ‘Cool your jets,’ as the gunslinger’s new friend might say.” Confidingly: “His name is Jake, but the housekeeper calls him ’Bama.” And then, in the bright tone of one just struck by a fine idea, he says, “I would show him to you! Both of them! Perhaps it’s not too late! Come!” He holds out a hand. The fingers emerging from the robe’s sleeve are long and white, somehow unpleasant. Like wax. When Callahan makes no move to come forward, the man in the robe speaks reasonably. “Come. You can’t stay here, you know. This is only a way station, and nobody stays here for long. Come.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man in the robe makes an impatient tsking sound. “No time for all that, Faddah. Name, name, what’s in a name, as someone or other said. Shakespeare? Virginia Woolf? Who can remember? Come, and I’ll show you a wonder. And I won’t touch you; I’ll walk ahead of you. See?”

  He turns. His robe swirls like the skirt of an evening dress. He walks back into the stable, and after a moment Callahan follows. The pump-room is no good to him, after all; the pump-room is a dead end. Outside the stable, he might be able to run.

  Run where?

  Well, that’s to see, isn’t it?

  The man
in the robe raps on the free-standing door as he passes it. “Knock on wood, Donnie be good!” he says merrily, and as he steps into the brilliant rectangle of light falling through the stable door, Callahan sees he’s carrying something in his left hand. It’s a box, perhaps a foot long and wide and deep. It looks like it might be made of the same wood as the door. Or perhaps it’s a heavier version of that wood. Certainly it’s darker, and even closer-grained.

  Watching the robed man carefully, meaning to stop if he stops, Callahan follows into the sun. The heat is even stronger once he’s in the light, the sort of heat he’s felt in Death Valley. And yes, as they step out of the stable he sees that they are in a desert. Off to one side is a ramshackle building that rises from a foundation of crumbling sandstone blocks. It might once have been an inn, he supposes. Or an abandoned set from a Western movie. On the other side is a corral where most of the posts and rails have fallen. Beyond it he sees miles of rocky, stony sand. Nothing else but—

  Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!

  “You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!”

  The man in the robe—it’s black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion—stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers. It’s like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but—

  “Who are they?” Callahan asks in a dry voice. “Who are you? Where is this place?”

  The man in black sighs theatrically. “So much backstory, so little time,” he says. “Call me Walter, if you like. As for this place, it’s a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn’t you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you’re on a real journey.”

  “Stop calling me that!” Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.

  “Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!” the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he’s laughing inside. He has an idea this man—if he is a man—spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. “Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I’ll call you Don. Do you like that better?”

  The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they’ll be gone for good.

  “Who are they?” he asks the man in black.

  “Folks you’ll almost certainly never meet,” the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. “They’ll die under the mountains. If they don’t die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive. Dod-a-chock!” He laughs again. But—

  But all at once you don’t sound completely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks.

  “If all else fails,” Walter says, “this will kill them.” He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. “And who will bring it to them? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” the man in black agrees sadly, “and I don’t have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. They’re following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again—how else will I draw them on? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny!”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Only there’s really no what-if about it. He’s never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks? What if he tells the man in black, “That’s where I’m supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be”? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean.

  As if to confirm this, Walter says, “What you want hardly matters. You’ll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course—as they almost certainly must—you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You’ll live on your level of the Tower long after I’m bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you’ll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It’s a mind-blower, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you say it’s a mind-blower?”

  He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He doesn’t want to go there, but there’s nowhere else. “Get away from me,” he says.

  “Nope,” says Walter, the man in black. “I can’t go for that, no can do.” He holds the box out toward Callahan. At the same time he reaches over the top of it and grasps the lid.

  “Don’t!” Callahan says sharply. Because the man in the black robe mustn’t open the box. There’s something terrible inside the box, something that would terrify even Barlow, the wily vampire who forced Callahan to drink his blood and then sent him on his way into the prisms of America like a fractious child whose company has become tiresome.

  “Keep moving and perhaps I won’t have to,” Walter teases.

  Callahan backs into the stable’s scant shadow. Soon he’ll be inside again. No help for it. And he can feel that strange only-there-on-one-side door waiting like a weight. “You’re cruel!” he bursts out.

  Walter’s eyes widen, and for a moment he looks deeply hurt. This may be absurd, but Callahan is looking into the man’s deep eyes and feels sure the emotion is nonetheless genuine. And the surety robs him of any last hope that all this might be a dream, or a final brilliant interval before true death. In dreams—his, at least—the bad guys, the scary guys, never have complex emotions.

  “I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We’re caught.”

  Callahan remembers the dream-west through which he traveled: the forgotten silos, the neglected sunsets and long shadows, his own bitter joy as he dragged his trap behind him, singing until the jingle of the very chains that held him became sweet music.

  “I know,” he says.

  “Yes, I see you do. Keep moving.”

  Callahan’s back in the stable now. Once again he can smell the faint, almost exhausted aroma of old hay. Detroit seems impossible, a hallucination. So do all his memories of America.

  “Don’t open that thing,” Callahan says, “and I will.”

  “What an excellent Faddah you are, Faddah.”

  “You promised not to call me that.”

  “Promises are made to be broken, Faddah.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to kill him,” Callahan said.

  Walter grimaces. “That’s ka’s business, not mine.”

  “Maybe not ka, either. Suppose he’s above ka?”

  Walter recoils, as if struck. I’ve blasphemed, Callahan thinks. And with this guy, I’ve an idea that’s no mean feat.

  “No one’s above ka, false priest,” the man in black spits at him. “And the room at the top of the Tower is empty. I know it is.”

  Although Callahan is not entirely sure what the man is talking about, his response is quick and sure. “You’re wrong. There is a God. He waits and sees all from His high place. He—”

  Then a great many things happen at exactly the same time. The water pump in the alcove goes on, starting its weary thudding cycle. And Callahan’s ass bumps into the heavy, smooth wood of the door. And the man in black thrusts the box forward, opening it as he does so. And his hood falls back, re
vealing the pallid, snarling face of a human weasel. (It’s not Sayre, but upon Walter’s forehead like a Hindu caste-mark is the same welling red circle, an open wound that never clots or flows.) And Callahan sees what’s inside the box: he sees Black Thirteen crouched on its red velvet like the slick eye of a monster that grew outside God’s shadow. And Callahan begins to shriek at the sight of it, for he senses its endless power: it may fling him anywhere or to the farthest blind alley of nowhere. And the door clicks open. And even in his panic—or perhaps below his panic—Callahan is able to think Opening the box has opened the door. And he is stumbling backward into some other place. He can hear shrieking voices. One of them is Lupe’s, asking Callahan why Callahan let him die. Another belongs to Rowena Magruder and she is telling him this is his other life, this is it, and how does he like it? And his hands come up to cover his ears even as one ancient boot trips over the other and he begins to fall backward, thinking it’s Hell the man in black has pushed him into, actual Hell. And when his hands come up, the weasel-faced man thrusts the open box with its terrible glass ball into them. And the ball moves. It rolls like an actual eye in an invisible socket. And Callahan thinks, It’s alive, it’s the stolen eye of some awful monster from beyond the world, and oh God, oh dear God, it is seeing me.

  But he takes the box. It’s the last thing in life he wants to do, but he is powerless to stop himself. Close it, you have to close it, he thinks, but he is falling, he has tripped himself (or the robed man’s ka has tripped him) and he’s falling, twisting around as he goes down. From somewhere below him all the voices of his past are calling to him, reproaching him (his mother wants to know why he allowed that filthy Barlow to break the cross she brought him all the way from Ireland), and incredibly, the man in black cries “Bon voyage, Faddah!” merrily after him.

  Callahan strikes a stone floor. It’s littered with the bones of small animals. The lid of the box closes and he feels a moment of sublime relief…but then it opens again, very slowly, disclosing the eye.

  “No,” Callahan whispers. “Please, no.”