Dark Tower V, The Read online

  He droned on, actually gathering steam as he descended toward trivialities.

  Eddie said, very mildly: “Do you like your balls, Calvin? Are you maybe as attached to them as they are to you?”

  Tower, who’d been wondering about who would feed Sergio if he just pulled up stakes and ran, now stopped and looked at him, puzzled, as if he had never heard this simple one-syllable word before.

  Eddie nodded helpfully. “Your nuts. Your sack. Your stones. Your cojones. The old sperm-firm. Your testicles.”

  “I don’t see what—”

  Eddie’s coffee was gone. He poured some Half and Half into the cup and drank that, instead. It was very tasty. “I told you that if you stayed here, you could look forward to a serious maiming. That’s what I meant. That’s probably where they’ll start, with your balls. To teach you a lesson. As to when it happens, what that mostly depends on is traffic.”

  “Traffic.” Tower said it with a complete lack of vocal expression.

  “That’s right,” Eddie said, sipping his Half and Half as if it were a thimble of brandy. “Basically how long it takes Jack Andolini to drive back out to Brooklyn and then how long it takes Balazar to load up some old beater of a van or panel truck with guys to come back here. I’m hoping Jack’s too dazed to just phone. Did you think Balazar’d wait until tomorrow? Convene a little brain-trust of guys like Kevin Blake and ’Cimi Dretto to discuss the matter?” Eddie raised first one finger and then two. The dust of another world was beneath the nails. “First, they got no brains; second, Balazar doesn’t trust em.

  “What he’ll do, Cal, is what any successful despot does: he’ll react right away, quick as a flash. The rush-hour traffic will hold em up a little, but if you’re still here at six, half past at the latest, you can say goodbye to your balls. They’ll hack them off with a knife, then cauterize the wound with one of those little torches, those Bernz-O-Matics—”

  “Stop,” Tower said. Now instead of white, he’d gone green. Especially around the gills. “I’ll go to a hotel down in the Village. There are a couple of cheap ones that cater to writers and artists down on their luck, ugly rooms but not that bad. I’ll call Aaron, and we’ll go north tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine, but first you have to pick a town to go to,” Eddie said. “Because I or one of my friends may need to get in touch with you.”

  “How am I supposed to do that? I don’t know any towns in New England north of Westport, Connecticut!”

  “Make some calls once you get to the hotel in the Village,” Eddie said. “You pick the town, and then tomorrow morning, before you leave New York, send your pal Aaron up to your vacant lot. Have him write the zip code on the board fence.” An unpleasant thought struck Eddie. “You have zip codes, don’t you? I mean, they’ve been invented, right?”

  Tower looked at him as if he were crazy. “Of course they have.”

  “ ’Kay. Have him put it on the Forty-sixth street side, all the way down where the fence ends. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “They probably won’t have your bookshop staked out tomorrow morning—they’ll assume you got smart and blew—but if they do, they won’t have the lot staked out, and if they have the lot staked out, it’ll be the Second Avenue side. And if they have the Forty-sixth Street side staked out, they’ll be looking for you, not him.”

  Tower was smiling a little bit in spite of himself. Eddie relaxed and smiled back. “But…? If they’re also looking for Aaron?”

  “Have him wear the sort of clothes he doesn’t usually wear. If he’s a blue jeans man, have him wear a suit. If he’s a suit man—”

  “Have him wear blue jeans.”

  “Correct. And sunglasses wouldn’t be a bad idea, assuming the day isn’t cloudy enough to make them look odd. Have him use a black felt-tip. Tell him it doesn’t have to be artistic. He just walks to the fence, as if to read one of the posters. Then he writes the numbers and off he goes. And tell him for Christ’s sake don’t fuck up.”

  “And how are you going to find us once you get to Zip Code Whatever?”

  Eddie thought of Took’s, and their palaver with the folken as they sat in the big porch rockers. Letting anyone who wanted to have a look and ask a question.

  “Go to the local general store. Have a little conversation, tell anyone who’s interested that you’re in town to write a book or paint pictures of the lobster-pots. I’ll find you.”

  “All right,” Tower said. “It’s a good plan. You do this well, young man.”

  I was made for it, Eddie thought but didn’t say. What he said was, “I have to be going. I’ve stayed too long as it is.”

  “There’s one thing you have to help me do before you go,” Tower said, and explained.

  Eddie’s eyes widened. When Tower had finished—it didn’t take long—Eddie burst out, “Aw, you’re shittin!”

  Tower tipped his head toward the door to his shop, where he could see that faint shimmer. It made the passing pedestrians on Second Avenue look like momentary mirages. “There’s a door there. You as much as said so, and I believe you. I can’t see it, but I can see something.”

  “You’re insane,” Eddie said. “Totally gonzo.” He didn’t mean it—not precisely—but less than ever he liked having his fate so firmly woven into the fate of a man who’d make such a request. Such a demand.

  “Maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” Tower said. He folded his arms over his broad but flabby chest. His voice was soft but the look in his eyes was adamant. “In either case, this is my condition for doing all that you say. For falling in with your madness, in other words.”

  “Aw, Cal, for God’s sake! God and the Man Jesus! I’m only asking you to do what Stefan Toren’s will told you to do.”

  The eyes did not soften or cut aside as they did when Tower was waffling or preparing to fib. If anything, they grew stonier yet. “Stefan Toren’s dead and I’m not. I’ve told you my condition for doing what you want. The only question is whether or not—”

  “Yeah, yeah, YEAH!” Eddie cried, and drank off the rest of the white stuff in his cup. Then he picked up the carton and drained that, for good measure. It looked like he was going to need the strength. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  Fifteen

  Roland could see into the bookshop, but it was like looking at things on the bottom of a fast-running stream. He wished Eddie would hurry. Even with the bullets buried deep in his ears he could hear the todash chimes, and nothing blocked the terrible smells: now hot metal, now rancid bacon, now ancient melting cheese, now burning onions. His eyes were watering, which probably accounted for at least some of the wavery look of things seen beyond the door.

  Far worse than the sound of the chimes or the smells was the way the ball was insinuating itself into his already compromised joints, filling them up with what felt like splinters of broken glass. So far he’d gotten nothing but a few twinges in his good left hand, but he had no illusions; the pain there and everywhere else would continue to increase for as long as the box was open and Black Thirteen shone out unshielded. Some of the pain from the dry twist might go away once the ball was hidden again, but Roland didn’t think all of it would. And this might only be the beginning.

  As if to congratulate him on his intuition, a baleful flare of pain settled into his right hip and began to throb there. To Roland it felt like a bag filled with warm liquid lead. He began to massage it with his right hand…as if that would do any good.

  “Roland!” The voice was bubbly and distant—like the things he could see beyond the door, it seemed to be underwater—but it was unmistakably Eddie’s. Roland looked up from his hip and saw that Eddie and Tower had carried some sort of case over to the unfound door. It appeared to be filled with books. “Roland, can you help us?”

  The pain had settled so deeply into his hips and knees that Roland wasn’t even sure he could get up…but he did it, and fluidly. He didn’t know how much of h
is condition Eddie’s sharp eyes might have already seen, but Roland didn’t want them to see any more. Not, at least, until their adventures in Calla Bryn Sturgis were over.

  “When we push it, you pull!”

  Roland nodded his understanding, and the bookcase slid forward. There was one strange and vertiginous moment when the half in the cave was firm and clear and the half still back in The Manhattan Bookstore of the Mind shimmered unsteadily. Then Roland took hold of it and pulled it through. It juddered and squalled across the floor of the cave, pushing aside little piles of pebbles and bones.

  As soon as it was out of the doorway, the lid of the ghostwood box began to close. So did the door itself.

  “No, you don’t,” Roland murmured. “No, you don’t, you bastard.” He slipped the remaining two fingers of his right hand into the narrowing space beneath the lid of the box. The door stopped moving and remained ajar when he did. And enough was enough. Now even his teeth were buzzing. Eddie was having some last little bit of palaver with Tower, but Roland no longer cared if they were the secrets of the universe.

  “Eddie!” he roared. “Eddie, to me!”

  And, thankfully, Eddie grabbed his swag-bag and came. The moment he was through the door, Roland closed the box. The unfound door shut a second later with a flat and undramatic clap. The chimes ceased. So did the jumble of poison pain pouring into Roland’s joints. The relief was so tremendous that he cried out. Then, for the next ten seconds or so, all he could do was lower his chin to his chest, close his eyes, and struggle not to sob.

  “Say thankya,” he managed at last. “Eddie, say thankya.”

  “Don’t mention it. Let’s get out of this cave, what do you think?”

  “I think yes,” Roland said. “Gods, yes.”

  Sixteen

  “Didn’t like him much, did you?” Roland asked.

  Ten minutes had passed since Eddie’s return. They had moved a little distance down from the cave, then stopped where the path twisted through a small rocky inlet. The roaring gale that had tossed back their hair and plastered their clothes against their bodies was here reduced to occasional prankish gusts. Roland was grateful for them. He hoped they would excuse the slow and clumsy way he was building his smoke. Yet he felt Eddie’s eyes upon him, and the young man from Brooklyn—who had once been almost as dull and unaware as Andolini and Biondi—now saw much.

  “Tower, you mean.”

  Roland tipped him a sardonic glance. “Of whom else would I speak? The cat?”

  Eddie gave a brief grunt of acknowledgment, almost a laugh. He kept pulling in long breaths of the clean air. It was good to be back. Going to New York in the flesh had been better than going todash in one way—that sense of lurking darkness had been gone, and the accompanying sense of thinness—but God, the place stank. Mostly it was cars and exhaust (the oily clouds of diesel were the worst), but there were a thousand other bad smells, too. Not the least of them was the aroma of too many human bodies, their essential polecat odor not hidden at all by the perfumes and sprays the folken put on themselves. Were they unconscious of how bad they smelled, all huddled up together as they were? Eddie supposed they must be. Had been himself, once upon a time. Once upon a time he couldn’t wait to get back to New York, would have killed to get there.

  “Eddie? Come back from Nis!” Roland snapped his fingers in front of Eddie Dean’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “As for Tower…no, I didn’t like him much. God, sending his books through like that! Making his lousy first editions part of his condition for helping to save the fucking universe!”

  “He doesn’t think of it in those terms…unless he does so in his dreams. And you know they’ll burn his shop when they get there and find him gone. Almost surely. Pour gasoline under the door and light it. Break his window and toss in a grenado, either manufactured or homemade. Do you mean to tell me that never occurred to you?”

  Of course it had. “Well, maybe.”

  It was Roland’s turn to utter the humorous grunting sound. “Not much may in that be. So he saved his best books. And now, in Doorway Cave, we have something to hide the Pere’s treasure behind. Although I suppose it must be counted our treasure now.”

  “His courage didn’t strike me as real courage,” Eddie said. “It was more like greed.”

  “Not all are called to the way of the sword or the gun or the ship,” Roland said, “but all serve ka.”

  “Really? Does the Crimson King? Or the low men and women Callahan talked about?”

  Roland didn’t reply.

  Eddie said, “He may do well. Tower, I mean. Not the cat.”

  “Very amusing,” Roland said dryly. He scratched a match on the seat of his pants, cupped the flame, lit his smoke.

  “Thank you, Roland. You’re growing in that respect. Ask me if I think Tower and Deepneau can get out of New York City clean.”

  “Do you?”

  “No, I think they’ll leave a trail. We could follow it, but I’m hoping Balazar’s men won’t be able to. The one I worry about is Jack Andolini. He’s creepy-smart. As for Balazar, he made a contract with this Sombra Corporation.”

  “Took the king’s salt.”

  “Yeah, I guess somewhere up the line he did,” Eddie said. He had heard King instead of king, as in Crimson King. “Balazar knows that when you make a contract, you have to fill it or have a damned good reason why not. Fail and word gets out. Stories start to circulate about how so-and-so’s going soft, losing his shit. They’ve still got three weeks to find Tower and force him to sell the lot to Sombra. They’ll use it. Balazar’s not the FBI, but he is a connected guy, and…Roland, the worst thing about Tower is that in some ways, none of this is real to him. It’s like he’s mistaken his life for a life in one of his storybooks. He thinks things have got to turn out all right because the writer’s under contract.”

  “You think he’ll be careless.”

  Eddie voiced a rather wild laugh. “Oh, I know he’ll be careless. The question is whether or not Balazar will catch him at it.”

  “We’re going to have to monitor Mr. Tower. Mind him for safety’s sake. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “Yer-bugger!” Eddie said, and after a moment’s silent consideration, both of them burst out laughing. When the fit had passed, Eddie said: “I think we ought to send Callahan, if he’ll go. You probably think I’m crazy, but—”

  “Not at all,” Roland said. “He’s one of us…or could be. I felt that from the first. And he’s used to traveling in strange places. I’ll put it to him today. Tomorrow I’ll come up here with him and see him through the doorway—”

  “Let me do it,” Eddie said. “Once was enough for you. At least for awhile.”

  Roland eyed him carefully, then pitched his cigarette over the drop. “Why do you say so, Eddie?”

  “Your hair’s gotten whiter up around here.” Eddie patted the crown of his own head. “Also, you’re walking a little stiff. It’s better now, but I’d guess the old rheumatiz kicked in on you a little. Fess up.”

  “All right, I fess,” Roland said. If Eddie thought it was no more than old Mr. Rheumatiz, that was not so bad.

  “Actually, I could bring him up tonight, long enough to get the zip code,” Eddie said. “It’ll be day again over there, I bet.”

  “None of us is coming up this path in the dark. Not if we can help it.”

  Eddie looked down the steep incline to where the fallen boulder jutted out, turning fifteen feet of their course into a tightrope-walk. “Point taken.”

  Roland started to get up. Eddie reached out and took his arm. “Stay a couple of minutes longer, Roland. Do ya.”

  Roland sat down again, looking at him.

  Eddie took a deep breath, let it out. “Ben Slightman’s dirty,” he said. “He’s the tattletale. I’m almost sure of it.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Eddie looked at him, wide-eyed. “You know? How could you possi
bly—”

  “Let’s say I suspected.”

  “How?”

  “His spectacles,” Roland said. “Ben Slightman the Elder’s the only person in Calla Bryn Sturgis with spectacles. Come on, Eddie, day’s waiting. We can talk as we walk.”

  Seventeen

  They couldn’t, though, not at first, because the path was too steep and narrow. But later, as they approached the bottom of the mesa, it grew wider and more forgiving. Talk once more became practical, and Eddie told Roland about the book, The Dogan or The Hogan, and the author’s oddly disputable name. He recounted the oddity of the copyright page (not entirely sure that Roland grasped this part), and said it had made him wonder if something was pointing toward the son, too. That seemed like a crazy idea, but—

  “I think that if Benny Slightman was helping his father inform on us,” Roland said, “Jake would know.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t?” Eddie asked.

  This gave Roland some pause. Then he shook his head. “Jake suspects the father.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He didn’t have to.”

  They had almost reached the horses, who raised their heads alertly and seemed glad to see them.

  “He’s out there at the Rocking B,” Eddie said. “Maybe we ought to take a ride out there. Invent some reason to bring him back to the Pere’s…” He trailed off, looking at Roland closely. “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is Jake’s part of it.”

  “That’s hard, Roland. He and Benny Slightman like each other. A lot. If Jake ends up being the one to show the Calla what his Dad’s been doing—”

  “Jake will do what he needs to do,” Roland said. “So will we all.”