The Dark Tower (31 page)

“Watch this,” Dinky said. “This is good.”

Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there was nothing to see but three men looking out over the dark desert toward the Cecil
B. DeMille sunbeam . . . and they
were
looking, Roland knew. Even with their eyes shut.

The sunbeam winked out. For a space of perhaps a dozen seconds the Devar-Toi was as dark as the desert, and Thunderclap Station, and the slopes of Steek-Tete. Then that absurd golden glow came back on. Dinky uttered a harsh (but not dissatisfied) sigh and stepped back, disengaging from Ted. A moment later, Ted let go of Stanley and turned to Roland.

“You did that?” the gunslinger asked.

“The three of us together,” Ted said. “Mostly it’s Stanley. He’s an extremely powerful sender. One of the few things that terrify Prentiss and the low men and the taheen is when they lose their artificial sunlight. It happens more and more often, you know, and not always because we’re meddling with the machinery. The machinery is just . . .” He shrugged. “It’s running down.”

“Everything is,” Eddie said.

Ted turned to him, unsmiling. “But not fast enough, Mr. Dean. This fiddling with the remaining two Beams must stop, and very soon, or it will make no difference. Dinky, Stanley, and I will help you if we can, even if it means killing the rest of them.”

“Sure,” Dinky said with a hollow smile. “If the Rev. Jim Jones could do it, why not us?”

Ted gave him a disapproving glance, then looked back at Roland’s ka-tet. “Perhaps it won’t come to that. But if it does . . .” He stood up suddenly and seized Roland’s arm.
“Are
we cannibals?” he asked in a harsh, almost strident voice. “Have we been eating the children the Greencloaks bring from the Borderlands?”

Roland was silent.

Ted turned to Eddie. “I want to know.”

Eddie made no reply.

“Madam-sai?” Ted asked, looking at the woman who sat astride Eddie’s hip. “We’re prepared to help you. Will you not help me by telling me what I ask?”

“Would knowing change anything?” Susannah asked.

Ted looked at her for a moment longer, then turned to Jake. “You really could be my young friend’s twin,” he said. “Do you know that, son?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Jake said. “It’s the way things work over here, somehow. Everything . . . um . . . fits.”

“Will you tell me what I want to know? Bobby would.”

So you can eat yourself alive?
Jake thought.
Eat yourself instead of them?

He shook his head. “I’m not Bobby,” he said. “No matter how much I might look like him.”

Ted sighed and nodded. “You stick together, and why would that surprise me? You’re ka-tet, after all.”

“We gotta go,” Dink told Ted. “We’ve already been here too long. It isn’t just a question of getting back for room-check; me n Stanley’ve got to trig their fucking telemetery so when Prentiss and The Wease check it they’ll say ‘Teddy B was there all the time. So was Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz, no problem with
those
boys.’”

“Yes,” Ted agreed. “I suppose you’re right. Five more minutes?”

Dinky nodded reluctantly. The sound of a siren, made faint by distance, came on the wind, and the young man’s teeth showed in a smile of genuine amusement. “They get
so
upset when the sun goes
in,” he said. “When they have to face up to what’s really around them, which is some fucked-up version of nuclear winter.”

Ted put his hands in his pockets for a moment, looking down at his feet, then up at Roland. “It’s time that this . . . this grotesque comedy came to an end. We three will be back tomorrow, if all goes well. Meanwhile, there’s a bigger cave about forty yards down the slope, and on the side away from Thunderclap Station and Algul Siento. There’s food and sleeping bags and a stove that runs on propane gas. There’s a map, very crude, of the Algul. I’ve also left you a tape recorder and a number of tapes. They probably don’t explain everything you’d like to know, but they’ll fill in many of the blank spots. For now, just realize that Blue Heaven isn’t as nice as it looks. The ivy towers are watchtowers. There are three runs of fence around the whole place. If you’re trying to get out from the inside, the first run you strike gives you a sting—”

“Like barbwire,” Dink said.

“The second one packs enough of a wallop to knock you out,” Ted went on. “And the third—”

“I think we get the picture,” Susannah said.

“What about the Children of Roderick?” Roland asked. “They have something to do with the Devar, for we met one on our way here who said so.”

Susannah looked at Eddie with her eyebrows raised. Eddie gave her a
tell-you-later
look in return. It was a simple and perfect bit of wordless communication, the sort people who love each other take for granted.

“
Those
wanks,” Dinky said, but not without sympathy. “They’re . . . what do they call em in the old movies? Trusties, I guess. They’ve got a little village
about two miles beyond the station in that direction.” He pointed. “They do groundskeeping work at the Algul, and there might be three or four skilled enough to do roofwork . . . replacing shingles and such. Whatever contaminants there are in the air here, those poor shmucks are especially vulnerable to em. Only on them it comes out looking like radiation sickness instead of just pimples and eczema.”

“Tell me about it,” Eddie said, remembering poor old Chevin of Chayven: his sore-eaten face and urine-soaked robe.

“They’re wandering
folken,
” Ted put in. “Bedouins. I think they follow the railroad tracks, for the most part. There are catacombs under the station and Algul Siento. The Rods know their way around them. There’s tons of food down there, and twice a week they’ll bring it into the Devar on sledges. Mostly now that’s what we eat. It’s still good, but . . .” He shrugged.

“Things are falling down fast,” Dinky said in a tone of uncharacteristic gloom. “But like the man said, the wine’s great.”

“If I asked you to bring one of the Children of Roderick with you tomorrow,” Roland said, “could you do that?”

Ted and Dinky exchanged a startled glance. Then both of them looked at Stanley. Stanley nodded, shrugged, and spread his hands before him, palms down:
Why, gunslinger?

Roland stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he turned to Ted. “Bring one with half a brain left in his head,” Roland instructed. “Tell him ‘Dan sur, dan tur, dan Roland, dan Gilead.’ Tell it back.”

Without hesitation, Ted repeated it.

Roland nodded. “If he still hesitates, tell him Chevin of Chayven says he must come. They speak a little plain, do they not?”

“Sure,” Dinky said. “But mister . . . you couldn’t let a Rod come up here and see you and then turn him free again. Their mouths are hung in the middle and run on both ends.”

“Bring one,” Roland said, “and we’ll see what we see. I have what my ka-mai Eddie calls a hunch. Do you ken hunch-think?”

Ted and Dinky nodded.

“If it works out, fine. If not . . . be assured that the fellow you bring will never tell what he saw here.”

“You’d kill him if your hunch doesn’t pan out?” Ted asked.

Roland nodded.

Ted gave a bitter laugh. “Of course you would. It reminds me of the part in
Huckleberry Finn
when Huck sees a steamboat blow up. He runs to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas with the news, and when one of them asks if anyone was killed, Huck says with perfect aplomb, ‘No, ma’am, only a nigger.’ In this case we can say ‘Only a Rod. Gunslinger-man had a hunch, but it didn’t pan out.’”

Roland gave him a cold smile, one that was unnaturally full of teeth. Eddie had seen it before and was glad it wasn’t aimed at him. He said, “I thought you knew what the stakes were, sai Ted. Did I misunderstand?”

Ted met his gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. His mouth was working.

During this, Dinky appeared to be engaged in silent palaver with Stanley. Now he said: “If you
want a Rod, we’ll get you one. It’s not much of a problem. The problem may be getting here at all. If we don’t . . .”

Roland waited patiently for the young man to finish. When he didn’t, the gunslinger asked: “If you don’t, what would you have us do?”

Ted shrugged. The gesture was such a perfect imitation of Dinky’s that it was funny. “The best you can,” he said. “There are also weapons in the lower cave. A dozen of the electric fireballs they call sneetches. A number of machine-guns, what I’ve heard some of the low men call speed-shooters. They’re U.S. Army AR-15s. Other things we’re not sure of.”

“One of them’s some kind of sci-fi raygun like in a movie,” Dinky said. “I think it’s supposed to disintegrate things, but either I’m too dumb to turn it on or the battery’s dead.” He turned anxiously to the white-haired man. “Five minutes are up, and more. We have to put an egg in our shoe and beat it, Tedster. Let’s chug.”

“Yes. Well, we’ll be back tomorrow. Perhaps by then you’ll have a plan.”

“You
don’t?” Eddie asked, surprised.

“My
plan was to run, young man. It seemed like a terribly bright idea at the time. I ran all the way to the spring of 1960. They caught me and brought me back, with a little help from my young friend Bobby’s mother. And now, we really must—”

“One more minute, do it please ya,” Roland said, and stepped toward Stanley. Stanley looked down at his feet, but his beard-scruffy cheeks once more flooded with color. And—

He’s shivering,
Susannah thought.
Like an animal in the woods, faced with its first human being.

Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah associated with certain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow’s forearms and looked earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger’s eyes met nothing but the masses of dark, curly hair on Stanley’s bowed head.

Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced him with a gesture.

“Will’ee not look me in the face?” Roland asked. He spoke with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice. “Will’ee not, before you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?”

Susannah felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Eddie grunted like a man who has been punched. She thought,
But Roland’s old . . . so old! Which means that if this is the tavern-boy he knew in Mejis . . . the one with the donkey and the pink
sombrera
hat . . . then he must
also
be . . .

The man raised his face slowly. Tears were streaming from his eyes.

“Good old Will Dearborn,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will do when it has lain long unused. “I’m so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun and shoot me, I’d understand. So I would.”

“Why do’ee say so, Sheemie?” Roland asked in that same gentle voice.

Stanley’s tears flowed faster. “You saved my life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mostly you, good old Will Dearborn who was really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved! And I loved her, too!”

The man’s face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from Roland. Yet Roland held him.

“None of that was your fault, Sheemie.”

“I should have died for her!” he cried. “I should have died in her place! I’m stupid! Foolish as they said!” He slapped himself across the face, first one way and then the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized the hand and forced it down to his side again.

“’Twas Rhea did the harm,” Roland said.

Stanley—who had been Sheemie an eon ago—looked into Roland’s face, searching his eyes.

“Aye,” Roland said, nodding. “’Twas the Cöos . . . and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless in the business, Sheemie—
Stanley
—it was you.”

“Do you say so, gunslinger? Truey-true?”

Roland nodded. “We’ll palaver all you would about this, if there’s time, and about those old days, but not now. No time now. You have to go with your friends, and I must stay with mine.”

Sheemie looked at him a moment longer, and yes, Susannah could now see the boy who had bustled about a long-ago tavern called the Travellers’ Rest, picking up empty beer schooners and dropping them into the wash-barrel which stood beneath the two-headed elk’s head that was known as The Romp, avoiding the occasional shove from Coral Thorin or the even more ill-natured kicks that were apt to come from an aging whore called Pettie the Trotter. She could see the boy who had almost been killed for spilling liquor on the boots of a hardcase named Roy Depape. It had been Cuthbert who had saved Sheemie from death that night . . . but it had
been Roland, known to the townsfolk as Will Dearborn, who had saved them all.

Sheemie put his arms around Roland’s neck and hugged him tight. Roland smiled and stroked his curly hair with his disfigured right hand. A loud, honking sob escaped Sheemie’s throat. Susannah could see the tears in the corners of the gunslinger’s eyes.

“Aye,” Roland said, speaking in a voice almost too low to hear. “I always knew you were special; Bert and Alain did, too. And here we find each other, well-met further down the path. We’re well-met, Sheemie son of Stanley. So we are. So we are.”