The Dark Tower (112 page)

“If I asked how I know you . . . or where you come from . . .” He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. “Or how I can possibly love you already . . . ?”

She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts the side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe—she can’t quite remember) is gone. “Sugar,” she tells him, “it’s what I said: a long story. You’ll get some of it in time, though . . . what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation.” She looks around and then says, “What year is this?”

“1987,” he says.

“And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?”

The young man whose dreams and squabbling
voices have led him here—with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket—bursts out laughing. “God, no! I’m from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He’s right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears.”

The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks.

“Let me introduce you,” he says.

“No, really, I—”

“Hey, if we’re gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We’re
tight
. Jake! Hey, Jake!”

She hasn’t noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears’ environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.

“Jake’s been dreaming about you, too,” Eddie tells her. “It’s the only reason I know I’m not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least.”

She takes Eddie’s hand—that familiar, well-loved hand. And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions—so will they—but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.

“You and Jake—what’s your last name?”

“Toren,” he says. “It’s German.”

Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there
was
happiness.

And they
did
live.

Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they
did
live.

That’s all.

That’s enough.

Say thankya.

I’ve told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was (I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless). I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-World. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the love-making all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God’s way of telling us we’ve finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say that is what
you paid your money for, the show you came to see.

I hope most of you know better.
Want
better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man (or Manni) can open. I’ve written many, but most only for the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroom—because it is the custom of the country.

And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last memory be of seeing Eddie, Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again for the first time, listening to the children’s choir sing “What Child Is This.” You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later Oy (probably a canine version with a long neck, odd gold-ringed eyes, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. That’s a pretty picture, isn’t it?
I
think so. And pretty close to happily ever after, too. Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say.

Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked
. What’s behind it won’t improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.”

Endings are heartless.

Ending is just another word for goodbye.

Would you still?

Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is the Dark Tower, at the end of End-World. See it, I beg.

See it very well.

Here is the Dark Tower at sunset.

He came to it with the oddest feeling of remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie called
déjà vu
.

The roses of Can’-Ka No Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow suns deep in their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that gray-black column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he had always known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he had always promised himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with perfect force, for no longer was there any need to reserve energy with which to fight the Tower’s pull. To give in—finally—was the greatest relief of his life.

He called the names of his
compadres
and
amoras,
and although each came from deeper in his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of him. His voice rolled away to the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He called Eddie’s and Susannah’s. He called Jake’s, and last of all he called his own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it. That horn was the
voice
of
the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast.

In my dreams the horn was always mine,
he thought.
I should have known better, for mine was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill.

A voice whispered from above him:
It would have been the work of three seconds to bend and pick it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Roland
—
it always comes back to that.

That was, he thought, the voice of the Beam—the one they had saved. If it spoke out of gratitude it could have saved its breath, for what good were such words to him now? He remembered a line from Browning’s poem:
One taste of the old times sets all to rights
.

Such had never been his experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They were the food of poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat.

Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the Tower’s base, letting the voice of the roses—that welcoming horn—echo away to nothing. The feeling of
déjà vu
was still strong, almost as though he had been here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams. He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson King had stood, trying to defy ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons that held the few remaining sneetches (the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it seemed), he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking down at him with eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the optic nerves (now tinted red-orange with the light of the leaving sun) trailed away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed
the Crimson King’s eyes would remain up there forever, watching Can’-Ka No Rey while their owner wandered the world to which Patrick’s eraser and enchanted Artist’s eye had sent him. Or, more likely, to the space
between
the worlds.

Roland walked on to where the path ended at the steel-banded slab of black ghostwood. Upon it, a sigul that he now knew well was engraved three-quarters of the way up:

Here he laid two things, the last of his gunna: Aunt Talitha’s cross, and his remaining sixgun. When he stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away:

UNFOUND
had become
FOUND
.

He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voice—
Welcome, Roland, thee of Eld
. It was the Tower’s voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself, likely, and the pulse he’d felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had always been Gan’s beating life-force.