2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

pointed at two dials marked in the henscratch of the old people (marks similar to those on the Unfound Door). The needle of each dial lay flat against theO mark on the left. When Finli tapped them with his furry thumbs, they jumped a little and then fell back.

“We don’t know exactly what these dials were actually meant to measure,” he said, “but one thing theydo measure is teleportation potential. We’ve had Breakers who’ve tried to shield the talent and it doesn’t work. If there was a teleport in the woodpile, Pimli o’ New Jersey, these needles would be jittering all the way up to fifty or even eighty.”

“So.” Half-smiling, half-serious, Pimli began to count off on his fingers. “No teleports, no

Bleeding Lion stalking from the north, no gunslinger-man. Oh, and the Greencloaks succumbed to a computer virus. If all that’s the case, what’s gotten under your skin? What feels hinky-di-di to ya?”

“The approaching end, I suppose.” Finli sighed heavily. “I’m going to double the guard in the watchtowers tonight, any ro’, and humes along the fence, as well.”

“Because it feels hinky-di-di.” Pimli, smiling a little.

“Hinky-di-di, yar.” Finli did not smile; his cunning little teeth remained hidden inside his shiny brown muzzle.

Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go up to The Study. Perhaps seeing all those Breakers at work will soothe you.”

“P’rhaps it will,” Finli said, but he still didn’t smile.

Pimli said gently, “It’s all right, Fin.”

“I suppose,” said the taheen, looking doubtfully around at the equipment, and then at

Beeman and Trelawney, the two low men, who were respectfully waiting at the door for the two big bugs to finish their palaver. “I suppose ’tis.” Only his heart didn’t believe it. The

only thing he was sure his heart believed was that there were no teleports left in Algul Siento.

Telemetry didn’t lie.

Seven

Beeman and Trelawney saw them all the way down the oak-paneled basement corridor to the staff elevator, which was also oak-paneled. There was a fire-extinguisher on the wall of the car and another sign reminding Devar-folkenthat they had to work together to create a fire-free environment.

This too had been turned upside down.

Pimli’s eyes met Finli’s. The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chief’s look, but of course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor, reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered in the shaft. If it froze, escape

through the upper hatch would be no problem, not even for a slightly overweight (well…quiteoverweight) fellow like Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and

there was plenty of help near at hand.

They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed elevator door was rightside up. It saidSTAFF ONLY andPLEASE USE KEY andGO DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY.

As Finli produced his key-card, he said with a casualness that might have been feigned

(Goddamn his unreadable black eyes): “Have you heard from sai Sayre?”

“No,” Pimli said (rather crossly), “nor do I really expect to. We’re isolated here for a

reason, deliberately forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be…well, the last time I saw him.”

“Relax,” Finli said. “I was just asking.” He swiped the key-card down its slot and the elevator door slid open with a rather hellishscreee sound.

Eight

The Study was a long, high room in the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass roof that allowed the Algul’s hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the

balcony opposite the door through which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall. Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of careful—and sometimes brittle—courtesy,

but one did not expect to see them socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it came to “socializing.” The Breakers below were neither animals in a zoo nor exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli o’ Tego, as well) had made this point to the staff

over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named David Burke, who had actually been throwing something—had it been peanut-shells?—down on the Breakers below. When

Burke had realized the Master was serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he’d never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear. He’d seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years,

perhaps for decades, and had taken it. You could see the nowtruly idiotic Mr. Burke around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left’rds Bound’ry, mouth slack and eyes vaguely

puzzled—Ialmostknow who I am, I almostremember what I did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn’t done when one was in the

presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.

Because it was refreshing.

For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called

“good mind” kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on

more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one’s heels leaving the floor in a kind of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets

tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you’d forgotten something, your five o’clock appointment or your brother-in-law’s middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you’d forgotten

was important, you were never distressed.Folken left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they’d come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit

the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.

The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached the wide fumed-oak railing

and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious library of some richly endowed gentlemen’s club in London. Softly glowing lamps, many with genuine Tiffany

shades, stood on little tables or shone on the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were

the most exquisite Turkish. There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another…and on a third was theMona Lisa . The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in

the Louvre on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him. From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting—trying to decipher the

famously enigmatic smile, maybe—but Pimli knew better. The men and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if you were right down there you’d see that they were gazing blankly over the tops of theirMcCall’s and theirHarper’s or a

little off to one side. An elevenor twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer dress

that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she wasn’t paying any attention to the

exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.

Thirty-three of them down there. Thirty-three in all. At eight o’clock, an hour after the

artificial sun snapped off, thirty-three fresh Breakers would troop in. And there was one fellow—one and one only—who came and went just as he pleased. A fellow who’d gone under the wire and paid no penalty for it at all…except for being brought back, that was,

and for this man, that was penalty enough.

As if the thought had summoned him, the door at the end of the room opened, and Ted Brautigan slipped quietly in. He was still wearing his tweed riding cap. Daneeka Rostov looked up from the dollhouse and gave him a smile. Brautigan dropped her a wink in return.

Pimli gave Finli a little nudge.

Finli: (I see him)

But it was more than seeing. Theyfelt him. The moment Brautigan came into the room,

those on the balcony—and, much more important, those on the floor—felt the power-level rise. They still weren’t completely sure what they’d gotten in Brautigan, and the testing equipment didn’t help in that regard (the old dog had blown out several pieces of it himself,

and on purpose, the Master was quite sure). If there were others like him, the low men had

found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had all the talent they needed to finish the job). One thing thatdid seem clear was Brautigan’s talent as a facilitator, a

psychic who was not just powerful by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just by being near them. Finli’s thoughts, ordinarily unreadable even to Breakers, now burned in Pimli’s mind like neon.

Finli: (He is extraordinary)

Pimli: (And, so far as we know, unique Have you seen the thing)

Image: Eyes growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.

Finli: (Yes Do you know what causes it)

Pimli: (Not at all Nor care dear Finli nor care That old)

Image: An elderly mongrel with burdocks in his matted fur, limping along on three legs.

(has almost finished his work almost time to)

Image: A gun, one of the hume guards’ Berettas, against the side of the old mongrel’s head.

Three stories below them, the subject of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a leather-upholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to swallow him, and appeared to read.

Pimli felt the psychic force rising past them and through them, to the skylight and through that, too, rising to the Beam that ran directly above Algul, working against it, chipping and eroding and rubbing relentlessly against the grain. Eating holes in the magic. Working patiently to put out the eyes of the Bear. To crack the shell of the Turtle. To break the Beam which ran from Shardik to Maturin. To topple the Dark Tower which stood between.

Pimli turned to his companion and wasn’t surprised to realize he could now see the cunning little teeth in the Tego’s weasel head. Smiling at last! Nor was he surprised to

realize he could read the black eyes. Taheen, under ordinary circumstances, could send and

receive some very simple mental communications, but not be progged. Here, though, all that changed. Here—

—Here Finli o’ Tego was at peace. His concerns

(hinky-di-di)

were gone. At least for the time being.

Pimli sent Finli a series of bright images: a champagne bottle breaking over the stern of a boat; hundreds of flat black graduation caps rising in the air; a flag being planted on Mount Everest; a laughing couple escaping a church with their heads bent against a pelting storm of rice; a planet—Earth—suddenly glowing with fierce brilliance.

Images that all said the same thing.

“Yes,” Finli said, and Pimli wondered how he could ever have thought those eyes hard to read. “Yes, indeed. Success at the end of the day.”

Neither of them looked down at that moment. Had they done, they would have seen Ted Brautigan—an old dog, yes, and tired, but perhaps notquite as tired as some thought—looking up at them.

With a ghost of his own smile.

Nine

There was never rain out here, at least not during Pimli’s years, but sometimes, in the

Stygian blackness of its nights, there were great volleys of dry thunder. Most of the Devar-Toi’s staff had trained themselves to sleep through these fusillades, but Pimli often woke up, heart hammering in his throat, the Our Father running through his mostly unconscious mind like a circle of spinning red ribbon.

Earlier that day, talking to Finli, the Master of Algul Siento had used the phrasehinky-di-di with a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child’s phrase, almost,

likeallee-allee-in-free oreenie-meenie-minie-moe .

Now, lying in his bed at Shapleigh House (known as Shit House to the Breakers), a full

Mall’s length away from Damli House, Pimli remembered the feeling—the flat-outcertainty —that everything was going to be okay; success assured, only a matter of time. On the balcony Finli had shared it, but Pimli wondered if his Security Chief was now lying awake as Pimli himself was, and thinking how easy it was to be misled when you were around working Breakers. Because, do ya, they sent up that happy-gas. That good-mind vibe.

And suppose…justsuppose, now…someone was actuallychanneling that feeling? Sending

A feeling both blue and strange crept among the gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged to him or her alone. Roland, who might have been expected to know the feeling for what it was (ka-shume, Cort would have called it), ascribed it instead to worries about the following day and even more to the debilitating atmosphere of Thunderclap, where day was dim and night was as dark as blindness.

Certainly there was enough to keep them busy after the departure of Brautigan, Earnshaw, and Sheemie Ruiz, that friend of Roland’s childhood. (Both Susannah and Eddie had

attempted to talk to the gunslinger about Sheemie, and Roland had shaken them off. Jake, strong in the touch, hadn’t even tried. Roland wasn’t ready to talk about those old days

again, at least not yet.) There was a path leading down and around the flank of Steek-Tete, and they found the cave of which the old man had told them behind a cunning camouflage of rocks and desert-dusty bushes. This cave was much bigger than the one above, with gas

lanterns hung from spikes that had been driven into the rock walls. Jake and Eddie lit two of these on each side, and the four of them examined the cave’s contents in silence.

The first thing Roland noticed was the sleeping-bags: a quartet lined up against the left-hand wall, each considerately placed on an inflated air mattress. The tags on the bags readPROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY . Beside the last of these, a fifth air mattress had been covered with a layer of bath towels.They were expecting four people and one animal, the gunslinger thought.Precognition, or have they been watching us somehow? And does it matter?

There was a plastic-swaddled object sitting on a barrel markedDANGER! MUNITIONS! Eddie removed the protective plastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of the reels was loaded. Roland could make nothing of the single word on the front of the speaking machine and asked Susannah what it was.

“Wollensak,” she said. “A German company. When it comes to these things, they make the best.”

“Not no mo’, sugarbee,” Eddie said. “In my when we like to say ‘Sony! No baloney!’They make a tape-player you can clip right to your belt. It’s called a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighs twenty pounds. More, with the batteries.”

Susannah was examining the unmarked tape boxes that had been stacked beside the

Wollensak. There were three of them. “I can’t wait to hear what’s on these,” she said.

“After the daylight goes, maybe,” Roland said. “For now, let’s see what else we’ve got here.”

“Roland?” Jake asked.

The gunslinger turned toward him. There was something about the boy’s face that almost

always softened Roland’s own. Looking at Jake did not make the gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give his features a quality they didn’t ordinarily have. Susannah thought it was

the look of love. And, perhaps, some thin hope for the future.

“What is it, Jake?”

“I know we’re going to fight—”

“ ‘Join us next week forReturn to the O.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee Van Cleef,’ ” Eddie murmured, walking toward the back of the cave. There a much larger object had been covered with what looked like a quilted mover’s pad.

“—but when?” Jake continued. “Will it be tomorrow?”

“Perhaps,” Roland replied. “I think the day after’s more likely.”

“I have a terrible feeling,” Jake said. “It’s not being afraid, exactly—”

“Do you think they’re going to beat us, hon?” Susannah asked. She put a hand on Jake’s

neck and looked into his face. She had come to respect his feelings. She sometimes wondered how much of what he was now had to do with the creature he’d faced to get here:

the thing in the house on Dutch Hill. No robot there, no rusty old clockwork toy. The doorkeeper had been a genuine leftover of thePrim . “You smell a whuppin in the wind? That it?”

“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve only felt something like it once, and that was just before…”

“Just before what?” Susannah asked, but before Jake had a chance to reply, Eddie broke in.

Roland was glad.Just before I fell. That was how Jake had meant to finish.Just before Roland letme fall.

“Holyshit! Come here, you guys! You gotta see this!”

Eddie had pulled away the mover’s pad and revealed a motorized vehicle that looked like a cross between an ATV and a gigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep zigzag treads. The controls were all on the handlebars. And there was a playing card propped on the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie plucked it up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman with a shawl over her head at a spinning wheel. It was the Lady of Shadows.

“Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride, sugarbee,” Eddie said.

Susannah had hurried over at her rapid crawl. Now she lifted her arms. “Boost me up! Boost me, Eddie!”

He did, and when she was in the saddle, holding handlebars instead of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susannah thumbed a red button and the engine thrummed to life, so low you could barely hear it. Electricity, not gasoline, Eddie was quite sure. Like a golf-cart, but probably a lot faster.

Susannah turned toward them, smiling radiantly. She patted the three-wheeler’s dark brown nacelle. “Call me Missus Centaur! I been lookin for this my whole life and never even knew.”

None of them noticed the stricken expression on Roland’s face. He bent over to pick up the card Eddie had dropped so no one would.

Yes, it was her, all right—the Lady of the Shadows. Under her shawl she seemed to be smiling craftily and sobbing, both at the same time. On the last occasion he’d seen that card,

it had been in the hand of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes that of Flagg.

You have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now,he had said.Worlds turn about your head .

And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among them for what it almost certainly

was: not worry or weariness but ka-shume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meant to sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.

Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows. Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming battle to break the power of the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had temporarily tilted in their favor would balance.

It never once crossed Roland’s mind that the one to die might be him.

Two

There were three brand names on what Eddie immediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (as in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the

Takuro Spirit); the third was North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well:U.S. ARMY , as inPROPERTY OF .

Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did. God knew there was plenty more

to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat was filled with food supplies (mostly freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn’t taste as good as Nigel’s chow but would

at least nourish them), bottled water, canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but nothing alcoholic), and the promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry. Some of the crates were markedU.S. ARMY , but by no means all.

Now their most basic abilities came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those

talents and intuitions that could have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring

long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakened them…cosseted them…and then filed their teeth to deadly points.

Hardly a word was spoken among them as Roland produced a wide prying tool from his purse and levered away the tops of the crates. Susannah had forgotten about the Cruisin Trike she had been waiting for all her life; Eddie forgot to make jokes; Roland forgot about his sense of foreboding. They became absorbed in the weaponry that had been left for them, and there was no piece of it they did not understand either at once or after a bit of study.

There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms

fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15’s. Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums.

They looked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics likeWhite Heat, only these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over, and found exactly what he

expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a whole company of men, that was sure.

There was a box of what looked like rocket shells with the lettersSTS stenciled on each. In a rack beside them, propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took to stop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.

Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome, like the severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols with the wordCOYOTE embossed on the butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to both weapons (in truth his heart was attracted toall the weapons), but he took one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but only oflooking andknowing .

“Hey,” Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. “Come look at this. Sneetches.”

“Check out the crate-lid,” Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside; Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a

lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the

drawing read:

PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON

24 “SNEETCHES”