Dark Tower V, The Read online

  Eddie did. The photograph showed a stark white church sitting on a hill above a dirt road. East Stoneham Methodist Meeting Hall, the caption said. Built 1819. Eddie thought: Add em, come out with nineteen. Of course.

  He mentioned this to Callahan, who smiled and nodded. “Notice anything else?”

  Of course he did. “It looks like the Calla Gathering Hall.”

  “So it does. Its twin, almost.” Callahan took a deep breath. “Are you ready for round two?”

  “I guess so.”

  “This one’s apt to be longer, but you should be able to pass the time. There’s plenty of reading matter.”

  “I don’t think I could read,” Eddie said. “I’m too fucking nervous, pardon my French. Maybe I’ll see what’s in the lining of the bag.”

  But Eddie forgot about the object in the lining of the pink bag; it was Susannah who eventually found that, and when she did, she was no longer herself.

  Three

  Thinking 1977 and holding the book open to the picture of the Methodist Meeting Hall in East Stoneham, Callahan stepped through the unfound door for the second time. He came out on a brilliantly sunny New England morning. The church was there, but it had been painted since its picture had been taken for Yankee Highways, and the road had been paved. Sitting nearby was a building that hadn’t been in the photo: the East Stoneham General Store. Good.

  He walked down there, followed by the floating doorway, reminding himself not to spend one of the quarters, which had come from his own little stash, unless he absolutely had to. The one from Jake was dated 1969, which was okay. His, however, was from 1981, and that wasn’t. As he walked past the Mobil gas pumps (where regular was selling for forty-nine cents a gallon), he transferred it to his back pocket.

  When he entered the store—which smelled almost exactly like Took’s—a bell jingled. To the left was a stack of Portland Press-Herald s, and the date gave him a nasty little shock. When he’d taken the book from the New York Public Library, not half an hour ago by his body’s clock, it had been June 26th. The date on these papers was the 27th.

  He took one, reading the headlines (a flood in New Orleans, the usual unrest among the homicidal idiots of the mideast) and noting the price: a dime. Good. He’d get change back from his ’69 quarter. Maybe buy a piece of good old Made in the U.S.A. salami. The clerk looked him over with a cheerful eye as he approached the counter.

  “That do it?” he asked.

  “Well, I tell you what,” Callahan said. “I could use a point toward the post office, if that does ya.”

  The clerk raised an eyebrow and smiled. “You sound like you’re from these parts.”

  “Do you say so, then?” Callahan asked, also smiling.

  “Ayuh. Anyway, post office is easy. Ain’t but a mile down this road, on your left.” He pronounced road rud, exactly as Jamie Jaffords might have done.

  “Good enough. And do you sell salami by the slice?”

  “I’ll sell it just about any old way you want to buy it,” the clerk said amiably. “Summer visitor, are you?” It came out summah visitah, and Callahan almost expected him to add Tell me, I beg.

  “You could call me that, I guess,” Callahan said.

  Four

  In the cave, Eddie fought against the faint but maddening jangle of the chimes and peered through the half-open door. Callahan was walking down a country road. Goody gumdrops for him. Meantime, maybe Mrs. Dean’s little boy would try having himself a bit of a read. With a cold (and slightly trembling) hand, he reached into the bookcase and pulled out a volume two down from one that had been turned upside down, one that would certainly have changed his day had he happened to grab it. What he came up with instead was Four Short Novels of Sherlock Holmes. Ah, Holmes, another great sage and eminent junkie. Eddie opened to A Study in Scarlet and began to read. Every now and then he found himself looking down at the box, where Black Thirteen pulsed out its weird force. He could just see a curve of glass. After a little bit he gave up trying to read, only looking at the curve of glass, growing more and more fascinated. But the chimes were fading, and that was good, wasn’t it? After a little while he could hardly hear them at all. A little while after that, a voice crept past the bullets in his ears and began to speak to him.

  Eddie listened.

  Five

  “Pardon me, ma’am.”

  “Ayuh?” The postmistress was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties, dressed to meet the public with hair of a perfect beauty-shop blue-white.

  “I’d like to leave a letter for some friends of mine,” Callahan said. “They’re from New York, and they’d likely be General Delivery customers.” He had argued with Eddie that Calvin Tower, on the run from a bunch of dangerous hoods who would almost certainly still want his head on a stick, wouldn’t do anything so dumb as sign up for mail. Eddie had reminded him of how Tower had been about his fucking precious first editions, and Callahan had finally agreed to at least try this.

  “Summer folk?”

  “Do ya,” Callahan agreed, but that wasn’t quite right. “I mean ayuh. Their names are Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau. I guess that isn’t information you’re supposed to give someone just in off the street, but—”

  “Oh, we don’t bother much about such things out in these parts,” she said. Parts came out pahts. “Just let me check the list…we have so many between Memorial Day and Labor Day…”

  She picked up a clipboard with three or four tattered sheets of paper on it from her side of the counter. Lots of handwritten names. She flicked over the first sheet to the second, then from the second to the third.

  “Deepneau!” she said. “Ayuh, there’s that one. Now…just let me see if I can find t’other ’un…”

  “Never mind,” Callahan said. All at once he felt uneasy, as though something had gone wrong back on the other side. He glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing but the door, and the cave, and Eddie sitting there cross-legged with a book in his lap.

  “Got somebody chasin ya?” the postlady asked, smiling.

  Callahan laughed. It sounded forced and stupid to his own ears, but the postlady seemed to sense nothing wrong. “If I were to write Aaron a note and put it in a stamped envelope, would you see that he gets it when he comes in? Or when Mr. Tower comes in?”

  “Oh, no need to buy a stamp,” said she, comfortably. “Glad to do it.”

  Yes, it was like the Calla. Suddenly he liked this woman very much. Liked her big-big.

  Callahan went to the counter by the window (the door doing a neat do-si-do around him when he turned) and jotted a note, first introducing himself as a friend of the man who had helped Tower with Jack Andolini. He told Deepneau and Tower to leave their car where it was, and to leave some of the lights on in the place where they were staying, and then to move somewhere close by—a barn, an abandoned camp, even a shed. To do it immediately. Leave a note with directions to where you are under the driver’s side floormat of your car, or under the back porch step, he wrote. We’ll be in touch. He hoped he was doing this right; they hadn’t talked things out this far, and he’d never expected to have to do any cloak-and-dagger stuff. He signed as Roland had told him to: Callahan, of the Eld. Then, in spite of his growing unease, he added another line, almost slashing the letters into the paper: And make this trip to the post office your LAST. How stupid can you be???

  He put the note in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote AARON DEEPNEAU OR CALVIN TOWER, GEN’L DELIVERY on the front. He took it back to the counter. “I’ll be happy to buy a stamp,” he told her again.

  “Nawp, just two cent’ for the envelope and we’re square.”

  He gave her the nickel left over from the store, took back his three cents change, and headed for the door. The ordinary one.

  “Good luck to ye,” the postlady called.

  Callahan turned his head to look at her and say thanks. He caught a glimpse of the unfound door when he did, still open. What he didn’t
see was Eddie. Eddie was gone.

  Six

  Callahan turned to that strange door as soon he was outside the post office. Ordinarily you couldn’t do that, ordinarily it swung with you as neatly as a square-dance partner, but it seemed to know when you intended to step back through. Then you could face it.

  The minute he was back the todash chimes seized him, seeming to etch patterns on the surface of his brain. From the bowels of the cave his mother cried, “There-now, Donnie, you’ve gone and let that nice boy commit suicide! He’ll be in purgie forever, and it’s your fault!”

  Callahan barely heard. He dashed to the mouth of the cave, still carrying the Press-Herald he’d bought in the East Stoneham General Store under one arm. There was just time to see why the box hadn’t closed, leaving him a prisoner in East Stoneham, Maine, circa 1977: there was a thick book sticking out of it. Callahan even had time to read the title, Four Short Novels of Sherlock Holmes. Then he burst out into sunshine.

  At first he saw nothing but the boulder on the path leading up to the mouth of the cave, and was sickeningly sure his mother’s voice had told the truth. Then he looked left and saw Eddie ten feet away, at the end of the narrow path and tottering on the edge of the drop. His untucked shirt fluttered around the butt of Roland’s big revolver. His normally sharp and rather foxy features now looked puffy and blank. It was the dazed face of a fighter out on his feet. His hair blew around his ears. He swayed forward…then his mouth tightened and his eyes became almost aware. He grasped an outcrop of rock and swayed back again.

  He’s fighting it, Callahan thought. And I’m sure he’s fighting the good fight, but he’s losing.

  Calling out might actually send him over the edge; Callahan knew this with a gunslinger’s intuition, always sharpest and most dependable in times of crisis. Instead of yelling he sprinted up the remaining stub of path and wound a hand in the tail of Eddie’s shirt just as Eddie swayed forward again, this time removing his hand from the outcrop beside him and using it to cover his eyes in a gesture that was unmeaningly comic: Goodbye, cruel world.

  If the shirt had torn, Eddie Dean would undoubtedly have been excused from ka’s great game, but perhaps even the tails of homespun Calla Bryn Sturgis shirts (for that was what he was wearing) served ka. In any case the shirt didn’t tear, and Callahan had held onto a great part of the physical strength he had built up during his years on the road. He yanked Eddie back and caught him in his arms, but not before the younger man’s head struck the outcrop his hand had been on a few seconds before. His lashes fluttered and he looked at Callahan with a kind of stupid unrecognition. He said something that sounded like gibberish to Callahan: Ihsay ahkin fly-oo ower.

  Callahan grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “What? I don’t understand you!” Nor did he much want to, but he had to make some kind of contact, had to bring Eddie back from wherever the accursed thing in the box had taken him. “I don’t…understand you!”

  This time the response was clearer: “It says I can fly to the Tower. You can let me go. I want to go!”

  “You can’t fly, Eddie.” He wasn’t sure that got through, so he put his head down—all the way, until he and Eddie were resting brow to brow, like lovers. “It was trying to kill you.”

  “No…” Eddie began, and then awareness came all the way back into his eyes. An inch from Callahan’s own, they widened in understanding. “Yes.”

  Callahan lifted his head, but still kept a prudent grip on Eddie’s shoulders. “Are you all right now?”

  “Yeah. I guess so, at least. I was going along good, Father. Swear I was. I mean, the chimes were doing a number on me, but otherwise I was fine. I even grabbed a book and started to read.” He looked around. “Jesus, I hope I didn’t lose it. Tower’ll scalp me.”

  “You didn’t lose it. You stuck it partway into the box, and it’s a damned good thing you did. Otherwise the door would have shut and you’d be strawberry jam about seven hundred feet down.”

  Eddie looked over the edge and went completely pale. Callahan had just time enough to regret his frankness before Eddie vomited on his new shor’boots.

  Seven

  “It crept up on me, Father,” he said when he could talk. “Lulled me and then jumped.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get anything at all out of your time over there?”

  “If they get my letter and do what it says, a great deal. You were right. Deepneau at least signed up for General Delivery. About Tower, I don’t know.” Callahan shook his head angrily.

  “I think we’re gonna find that Tower talked Deepneau into it,” Eddie said. “Cal Tower still can’t believe what he’s gotten himself into, and after what just happened to me—almost happened to me—I’ve got some sympathy for that kind of thinking.” He looked at what Callahan still had clamped under one arm. “What’s that?”

  “The newspaper,” Callahan said, and offered it to Eddie. “Care to read about Golda Meir?”

  Eight

  Roland listened carefully that evening as Eddie and Callahan recounted their adventures in the Doorway Cave and beyond. The gunslinger seemed less interested in Eddie’s near-death experience than he was in the similarities between Calla Bryn Sturgis and East Stoneham. He even asked Callahan to imitate the accent of the storekeeper and the postlady. This Callahan (a former Maine resident, after all) was able to do quite well.

  “Do ya,” said Roland, and then: “Ayuh. Do ya, ayuh.” He sat thinking, one bootheel cocked up on the rail of the rectory porch.

  “Will they be okay for awhile, do you think?” Eddie asked.

  “I hope so,” Roland replied. “If you want to worry about someone’s life, worry about Deepneau’s. If Balazar hasn’t given up on the vacant lot, he has to keep Tower alive. Deepneau’s nothing but a Watch Me chip now.”

  “Can we leave them until after the Wolves?”

  “I don’t see what choice we have.”

  “We could drop this whole business and go over there to East Overshoe and protect him!” Eddie said heatedly. “How about that? Listen, Roland, I’ll tell you exactly why Tower talked his friend into signing up for General Delivery: somebody’s got a book he wants, that’s why. He was dickering for it and negotiations had reached the delicate stage when I showed up and persuaded him to head for the hills. But Tower…man, he’s like a chimp with a handful of grain. He won’t let go. If Balazar knows that, and he probably does, he won’t need a zip code to find his man, just a list of the people Tower did business with. I hope to Christ that if there was a list, it burned up in the fire.”

  Roland was nodding. “I understand, but we can’t leave here. We’re promised.”

  Eddie thought it over, sighed, and shook his head. “What the hell, three and a half more days over here, seventeen over there before the deal-letter Tower signed expires. Things’ll probably hold together that long.” He paused, biting his lip. “Maybe.”

  “Is maybe the best we can do?” Callahan asked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “For the time being, I guess it is.”

  Nine

  The following morning, a badly frightened Susannah Dean sat in the privy at the foot of the hill, bent over, waiting for her current cycle of contractions to pass. She’d been having them for a little over a week now, but these were by far the strongest. She put her hands on her lower belly. The flesh there was alarmingly hard.

  Oh dear God, what if I’m having it right now? What if this is it?

  She tried to tell herself this couldn’t be it, her water hadn’t broken and you couldn’t go into genuine labor until that happened. But what did she actually know about having babies? Very little. Even Rosalita Munoz, a midwife of great experience, wouldn’t be able to help her much, because Rosa’s career had been delivering human babies, of mothers who actually looked pregnant. Susannah looked less pregnant now than when they’d first arrived in the Calla. And if Roland was right about this baby—

  It’s not a ba
by. It’s a chap, and it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Mia, whoever she is. Mia, daughter of none.

  The cramps ceased. Her lower belly relaxed, losing that stony feel. She laid a finger along the cleft of her vagina. It felt the same as ever. Surely she was going to be all right for another few days. She had to be. And while she’d agreed with Roland that there should be no more secrets in their ka-tet, she felt she had to keep this one. When the fighting finally started, it would be seven against forty or fifty. Maybe as many as seventy, if the Wolves stuck together in a single pack. They would have to be at their very best, their most fiercely concentrated. That meant no distractions. It also meant that she must be there to take her place.

  She yanked up her jeans, did the buttons, and went out into the bright sunshine, absently rubbing at her left temple. She saw the new lock on the privy—just as Roland had asked—and began to smile. Then she looked down at her shadow and the smile froze. When she’d gone into the privy, her Dark Lady had stretched out nine-in-the-morning long. Now she was saying that if noon wasn’t here, it would be shortly.

  That’s impossible. I was only in there a few minutes. Long enough to pee.

  Perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was Mia who had been in there the rest of the time.

  “No,” she said. “That can’t be so.”

  But Susannah thought it was. Mia wasn’t ascendant—not yet—but she was rising. Getting ready to take over, if she could.

  Please, she prayed, putting one hand out against the privy wall to brace herself. Just three more days, God. Give me three more days as myself, let us do our duty to the children of this place, and then what You will. Whatever You will. But please—

  “Just three more,” she murmured. “And if they do us down out there, it won’t matter noway. Three more days, God. Hear me, I beg.”

  Ten

  A day later, Eddie and Tian Jaffords went looking for Andy and came upon him standing by himself at the wide and dusty junction of East and River Roads, singing at the top of his…