The Dark Tower (6 page)

Eddie returned to John Cullum’s old car the way he’d sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let alone where.

He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and Roland were floating in each other’s arms like unborn twins in the womb, only this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape.
Don’t waste your time, John,
he thought.
No true thread there, that’s a dead-end gadget if there ever was one.

Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the domelight of John Cullum’s scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w—

Then gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford’s cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie’s midsection hit the top of the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh. Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.

Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head:
Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!

How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but
there,
the sound of bestial, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.

Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger’s left hand, thinking:
He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it
—“—and may you climb to the top,” Eddie breathed.

They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked—askew but otherwise peacefully enough—at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could
be
such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them—

Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it and forced it down.

“Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone.” A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was
right, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s eyes were shiny with tears.
“He’s
gone, too. The Pere.”

“The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did . . . Did they . . . ?” Eddie couldn’t finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one of
them
was too awful to speak aloud.

“No, Eddie. Not at all. He—” Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking at Eddie as he did it.

“He escaped them,” Eddie said.

“Aye, and how angry they must be.”

Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No,
sobbing
. “Good,” he said. “Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself with it.” And as Roland did: “What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?”

“I think it was a bit of both,” Roland said. “There’s a thing called
aven kal,
which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it.”

“And allowed to see what we wanted to see.”

Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. “We saw what the
Beam
wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go.”

“Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in . . . I don’t know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends o’ the Rainbow?”

Roland was smiling. “Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales.”

“Logicka-
what
?”

Roland didn’t answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get his breath back—both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the
potential
of sai King . . . of what sai King might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn’t King also being carried on
aven kal,
perhaps generating the very wave that lifted him?

A man can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries,
Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man
could
pull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator? And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something from nothing—seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?

And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long philosophical thoughts while two members of his tet were lost?

“Get this carriage going,” Roland said, trying to ignore the sweet humming he could hear—whether the Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know. “We’ve got to get to
Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way through to where Susannah is.”

And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.

Eddie reached for the transmission lever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie had never quit running—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at Roland with a bleak eye.

“What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is, spill it quick. The baby’s coming now—may have come already. Soon they’ll have no more use for her!”

“I know,” Eddie said. “But we can’t go to Lovell.” He grimaced as if what he was saying was causing him physical pain. Roland guessed it probably was. “Not yet.”

They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweetly tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices. They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a million faces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you say lost.

Eddie half-expected Roland to shout at him—it wouldn’t be the first time—or maybe clout him upside the head, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when his pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to the jaw might clear his head, by Shardik.

Only muddy thinking’s not the trouble and you know
it,
he thought.
Your head is clearer than his. If it wasn’t, you could let go of this world and go on hunting for your lost wife.

At last Roland spoke. “What is it, then? This?” He bent and picked up the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau’s pinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked it into Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.

“You know how much I love her,” Eddie said in a low, strained voice. “You
know
that.”

Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared to be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.

“I’d go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, this
second!
But we
have
to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave today, July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We—”

“Eddie, we’ve been through all of this.” Still not looking at him.

“Yes, but do you
understand
it? Only one bullet to shoot, one ’Riza to throw. That’s why we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Almost pleading now.
“Wasn’t
I?”

Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was glad. This was hard enough,
wretched
enough, without
having to bear the turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.

“And it may not matter if we stay a little longer. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those two beds, Roland—if we concentrate on Suze and Mia
as we last saw them
—then it’s possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn’t it?”

After a long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn’t conscious of drawing a single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they found what the gunslinger had come to think of as an “old-ones door,” because such doors were
dedicated,
and always came out at the same place. But were they to find a
magic
door somewhere along Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behind when the
Prim
receded, then yes, they might be able to cut in where they wanted. But such doors could be tricky, too; this they had found out for themselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door there had sent Jake and Callahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie, thereby scattering all their plans into the Land of Nineteen.

“What else must we do?” Roland said. There was no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded both tired and unsure.

“Whatever it is, it’s gonna be hard. That much I guarantee you.”

Eddie took the bill of sale and gazed at it as grimly as any Hamlet in the history of drama had ever stared upon the skull of poor Yorick. Then he looked back at Roland. “This gives us title to the vacant lot with the rose in it. We need to get it to Moses Carver of Holmes Dental Industries. And where is he? We don’t know.”

“For that matter, Eddie, we don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

Eddie voiced a wild laugh. “You say true, I say thankya! Why don’t I turn us around, Roland? I’ll drive us back to Stephen King’s house. We can cadge twenty or thirty bucks off him—because, brother, I don’t know if you noticed, but we don’t have a crying dime between the two of us—but more important, we can get him to write us a really good hardboiled private eye, someone who looks like Bogart and kicks ass like Clint Eastwood. Let
him
track down this guy Carver for us!”

He shook his head as if to clear it. The hum of the voices sounded sweetly in his ears, the perfect antidote to the ugly todash chimes.

“I mean, my wife is in bad trouble somewhere up the line, for all I know she’s being eaten alive by vampires or vampire bugs, and here I sit beside a country road with a guy whose most basic skill is shooting people, trying to work out how I’m going to start a fucking
corporation!
”

“Slow down,” Roland said. Now that he was resigned to staying in this world a little longer, he seemed calm enough. “Tell me what it is you feel we need to do before we can shake the dirt of this where and when from our heels for good.”

So Eddie did.

Roland had heard a good deal of it before, but hadn’t fully understood what a difficult position they were in. They owned the vacant lot on Second Avenue, yes, but their basis for ownership was a holographic document that would look mighty
shaky in a court o’ legal, especially if the powers-that-be from the Sombra Corporation started throwing lawyers at them.

Eddie wanted to get the writ of trade to Moses Carver, if he could, along with the information that his goddaughter, Odetta Holmes—missing for thirteen years by the summer of 1977—was alive and well and wanted above all things for Carver to assume guardianship, not just of the vacant lot itself, but of a certain rose growing wild within its borders.

Moses Carver—if still alive—had to be convinced enough by what he heard to fold the so-called Tet Corporation into Holmes Industries (or vice-versa). More! He had to dedicate what was left of his life (and Eddie had an idea Carver might be Aaron Deepneau’s age by now) to building a corporate giant whose only real purpose was to thwart two other corporate giants, Sombra and North Central Positronics, at every turn. To strangle them if possible, and keep them from becoming a monster that would leave its destroyer’s track across all the dying expanse of Mid-World and mortally wound the Dark Tower itself.

“Maybe we should have left the writ o’ trade with sai Deepneau,” Roland mused when he had heard Eddie through to the end. “At least he could have located this Carver and sought him out and told our tale for us.”

“No, we did right to keep it.” This was one of the few things of which Eddie was completely sure. “If we’d left this piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau, it’d be ashes in the wind by now.”

“You believe Tower would have repented his bargain and talked his friend into destroying it?”

“I know it,” Eddie said. “But even if Deepneau could stand up to his old friend going yatta-yatta-yatta in his ear for hours on end—‘Burn it, Aaron, they coerced me and now they mean to screw me, you know it as well as I do, burn it and we’ll call the cops on those
momsers
’—do you think Moses Carver would believe such a crazy story?”