The Dark Tower (4 page)

“No-ooo, you daren’t!
” Tirana cried, and as she reached for the gun, the front of her gown finally burst, spilling her massive breasts free. They were covered with coarse fur.

Callahan pulled the trigger. The Ruger’s report was deafening in the dining room. Andrew’s head exploded like a gourd filled with blood, spraying the creatures who had been crowding in behind him. There were screams of horror and disbelief. Callahan had time to think,
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, was it?
And:
Is it enough to put me in the club? Am I a gunslinger yet?

Perhaps not. But there was the bird-man, standing right in front of him between two tables, its beak opening and closing, its throat beating visibly with excitement.

Smiling, propping himself on one elbow as blood pumped onto the carpet from his torn throat, Callahan leveled Jake’s Ruger.

“No!
” Meiman cried, raising his misshapen hands to his face in an utterly fruitless gesture of protection. “
No, you CAN’T
—”

Can so,
Callahan thought with childish glee, and fired again. Meiman took two stumble-steps backward, then a third. He struck a table and collapsed on top of it. Three yellow feathers hung above him on the air, seesawing lazily.

Callahan heard savage howls, not of anger or fear but of hunger. The aroma of blood had finally penetrated the old ones’ jaded nostrils, and
nothing would stop them now. So, if he didn’t want to join them—

Pere Callahan, once Father Callahan of ’Salem’s Lot, turned the Ruger’s muzzle on himself. He wasted no time looking for eternity in the darkness of the barrel but placed it deep against the shelf of his chin.

“Hile, Roland!” he said, and knew

(
the wave they are lifted by the wave
)

that he was heard. “Hile, gunslinger!”

His finger tightened on the trigger as the ancient monsters fell upon him. He was buried in the reek of their cold and bloodless breath, but not daunted by it. He had never felt so strong. Of all the years in his life he had been happiest when he had been a simple vagrant, not a priest but only Callahan o’ the Roads, and felt that soon he would be let free to resume that life and wander as he would, his duties fulfilled, and that was well.

“May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it,
and may you climb to the top!
”

The teeth of his old enemies, these ancient brothers and sisters of a thing which had called itself Kurt Barlow, sank into him like stingers. Callahan felt them not at all. He was smiling as he pulled the trigger and escaped them for good.

On their way out along the dirt camp-road which had taken them to the writer’s house in the town of Bridgton, Eddie and Roland came upon an orange pickup truck with the words
CENTRAL MAINE POWER MAINTENANCE
painted on the sides. Nearby, a man in a yellow hardhat and an orange high-visibility vest was cutting branches that threatened the low-hanging electrical lines. And did Eddie feel something then, some gathering force? Maybe a precursor of the wave rushing down the Path of the Beam toward them? He later thought so, but couldn’t say for sure. God knew he’d been in a weird enough mood already, and why not? How many people got to meet their creators? Well . . . Stephen King
hadn’t
created Eddie Dean, a young man whose Co-Op City happened to be in Brooklyn rather than the Bronx—not yet, not in that year of 1977, but Eddie felt certain that in time King would. How else could he be here?

Eddie nipped in ahead of the power-truck, got out, and asked the sweating man with the brush-hog in his hands for directions to Turtleback Lane, in the town of Lovell. The Central Maine Power guy passed on the directions willingly enough,
then added: “If you’re serious about going to Lovell today, you’re gonna have to use Route 93. The Bog Road, some folks call it.”

He raised a hand to Eddie and shook his head like a man forestalling an argument, although Eddie had not in fact said a word since asking his original question.

“It’s seven miles longer, I know, and jouncy as a bugger, but you can’t get through East Stoneham today. Cops’ve got it blocked off. State Bears, local yokels, even the Oxford County Sheriff’s Department.”

“You’re kidding,” Eddie said. It seemed a safe enough response.

The power guy shook his head grimly. “No one seems to know exactly what’s up, but there’s been shootin—automatic weapons, maybe—and explosions.” He patted the battered and sawdusty walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “I’ve even heard the t-word once or twice this afternoon. Not s’prised, either.”

Eddie had no idea what the t-word might be, but knew Roland wanted to get going. He could feel the gunslinger’s impatience in his head; could almost see Roland’s impatient finger-twirling gesture, the one that meant
Let’s go, let’s go
.

“I’m talking ’bout terrorism,” the power guy said, then lowered his voice. “People don’t think shit like that can happen in America, buddy, but I got news for you, it can. If not today, then sooner or later. Someone’s gonna blow up the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, that’s what I think—the right-wingers, the left-wingers, or the goddam A-rabs. Too many crazy people.”

Eddie, who had a nodding acquaintance with ten more years of history than this fellow, nodded. “You’re probably right. In any case, thanks for the info.”

“Just tryin to save you some time.” And, as Eddie opened the driver’s-side door of John Cullum’s Ford sedan: “You been in a fight, mister? You look kinda bunged up. Also you’re limping.”

Eddie had been in a fight, all right: had been grooved in the arm and plugged in the right calf. Neither wound was serious, and in the forward rush of events he had nearly forgotten them. Now they hurt all over again. Why in God’s name had he turned down Aaron Deepneau’s bottle of Percocet tablets?

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s why I’m going to Lovell. Guy’s dog bit me. He and I are going to have a talk about it.” Bizarre story, didn’t have much going for it in the way of plot, but he was no writer. That was King’s job. In any case, it was good enough to get him back behind the wheel of Cullum’s Ford Galaxie before the power guy could ask him any more questions, and Eddie reckoned that made it a success. He drove away quickly.

“You got directions?” Roland asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Everything’s breaking at once, Eddie. We have to get to Susannah as fast as we can. Jake and Pere Callahan, too. And the baby’s coming, whatever it is. May have come already.”

Turn right when you get back out to Kansas Road,
the power guy had told Eddie (Kansas as in Dorothy, Toto, and Auntie Em, everything breaking at once), and he did. That put them rolling
north. The sun had gone behind the trees on their left, throwing the two-lane blacktop entirely into shadow. Eddie had an almost palpable sense of time slipping through his fingers like some fabulously expensive cloth that was too smooth to grip. He stepped on the gas and Cullum’s old Ford, although wheezy in the valves, walked out a little. Eddie got it up to fifty-five and pegged it there. More speed might have been possible, but Kansas Road was both twisty and badly maintained.

Roland had taken a sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and was now studying it (although Eddie doubted if the gunslinger could actually read much of the document; this world’s written words would always be mostly mystery to him). At the top of the paper, above Aaron Deepneau’s rather shaky but perfectly legible handwriting (and Calvin Tower’s all-important signature), was a smiling cartoon beaver and the words
DAM IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO
. A silly pun if ever there was one.

I don’t like silly questions, I won’t play silly games,
Eddie thought, and suddenly grinned. It was a point of view to which Roland still held, Eddie felt quite sure, notwithstanding the fact that, while riding Blaine the Mono, their lives had been saved by a few well-timed silly questions. Eddie opened his mouth to point out that what might well turn out to be the most important document in the history of the world—more important than the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence or Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity—was headed by a dumb pun, and how did Roland like them apples? Before he could get out a single word, however, the wave struck.

His foot slipped off the gas pedal, and that was good. If it had stayed on, both he and Roland would surely have been injured, maybe killed. When the wave came, staying in control of John Cullum’s Ford Galaxie dropped all the way off Eddie Dean’s list of priorities. It was like that moment when the roller coaster has reached the top of its first mountain, hesitates a moment . . . tilts . . .
plunges
. . . and you fall with a sudden blast of hot summer air in your face and a pressure against your chest and your stomach floating somewhere behind you.

In that moment Eddie saw everything in Cullum’s car had come untethered and was floating—pipe ashes, two pens and a paperclip from the dashboard, Eddie’s dinh, and, he realized, his dinh’s ka-mai, good old Eddie Dean. No wonder he had lost his stomach! (He wasn’t aware that the car itself, which had drifted to a stop at the side of the road, was also floating, tilting lazily back and forth five or six inches above the ground like a small boat on an invisible sea.)

Then the tree-lined country road was gone. Bridgton was gone. The world was gone. There was the sound of todash chimes, repulsive and nauseating, making him want to grit his teeth in protest . . . except his teeth were gone, too.

Like Eddie, Roland had a clear sense of being first
lifted
and then
hung,
like something that had lost its ties to Earth’s gravity. He heard the chimes and
felt himself elevated through the wall of existence, but he understood this wasn’t real todash—at least not of the sort they’d experienced before. This was very likely what Vannay called
aven kal,
words which meant
lifted on the wind
or
carried on the wave
. Only the
kal
form, instead of the more usual
kas,
indicated a natural force of disastrous proportions: not a wind but a hurricane; not a wave but a
tsunami
.

The very Beam means to speak to you, Gabby,
Vannay said in his mind—Gabby, the old sarcastic nickname Vannay had adopted because Steven Deschain’s boy was so close-mouthed. His limping, brilliant tutor had stopped using it (probably at Cort’s insistence) the year Roland had turned eleven.
You would do well to listen if it does.

I will listen very well,
Roland replied, and was dropped. He gagged, weightless and nauseated.

More chimes. Then, suddenly, he was floating again, this time above a room filled with empty beds. One look was enough to assure him that this was where the Wolves brought the children they kidnapped from the Borderland Callas. At the far end of the room—

A hand grasped his arm, a thing Roland would have thought impossible in this state. He looked to his left and saw Eddie beside him, floating naked. They were both naked, their clothes left behind in the writer’s world.

Roland had already seen what Eddie was pointing to. At the far end of the room, a pair of beds had been pushed together. A white woman lay on one of them. Her legs—the very ones Susannah had used on their todash visit to New York, Roland had no doubt—were spread wide. A woman with
the head of a rat—one of the taheen, he felt sure—bent between them.

Next to the white woman was a dark-skinned one whose legs ended just below the knees. Floating naked or not, nauseated or not, todash or not, Roland had never in his life been so glad to see anyone. And Eddie felt the same. Roland heard him cry out joyfully in the center of his head and reached a hand to still the younger man. He
had
to still him, for Susannah was looking at them, had almost certainly seen them, and if she spoke to them, he needed to hear every word she said. Because although those words would come from her mouth, it would very likely be the Beam that spoke; the Voice of the Bear or that of the Turtle.

Both women wore metal hoods over their hair. A length of segmented steel hose connected them.

Some kind of Vulcan mind-meld,
Eddie said, once again filling the center of his head and blotting out everything else.
Or maybe
—

Hush!
Roland broke in.
Hush, Eddie, for your father’s sake!

A man wearing a white coat seized a pair of cruel-looking forceps from a tray and pushed the rathead taheen nurse aside. He bent, peering up between Mia’s legs and holding the forceps above his head. Standing close by, wearing a tee-shirt with words of Eddie and Susannah’s world on it, was a taheen with the head of a fierce brown bird.

He’ll sense us,
Roland thought.
If we stay long enough, he’ll surely sense us and raise the alarm.