2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

mind-numbing blasts of what sounds like mental static—white noise. I assumed it was some sort of protective device; Dinky believes it’s the way they actuallythink . Either way, it makes it easier for them. They don’t have to remember to put on hats in the morning

when they go out!

“Trampas was one of the can-toi rovers. You might see him one day strolling along Main Street in Pleasantville, or sitting on a bench in the middle of the Mall, usually with some self-help book likeSeven Steps to Positive Thinking . Then, the next day, there he is

leaning against the side of Heartbreak House, taking in the sun. Same with the other can-toi floaters. If there’s a pattern, I’ve never been able to anticipate it, or Dinky either. We don’t

think there is one.

“What’s always made Trampas different is a complete lack of that sense of jealousy. He’s actually friendly—or was; in some ways he hardly seemed to be a low man at all. Not many of his can-toi colleagues seem to like him a whole hell of a lot. Which is ironic, you know, because if there reallyis such a thing asbecoming, then Trampas is one of the few who actually seem to be getting somewhere with it. Simple laughter, for instance. When most low men laugh, it sounds like a basket of rocks rolling down a tin coal-chute: makes you fair shiver, as Tanya says. When Trampas laughs, he sounds a little high-pitched but otherwise normal. Because heis laughing, I think. Genuinely laughing. The others are just forcing it.

“Anyway, I struck up a conversation with him one day. On Main Street, this was, outside the Gem.Star Wars was back for its umpty-umpth revival. If there’s any movie the Breakers never get enough of, it’sStar Wars .

“I asked him if he knew where his name came from. He said yes, of course, from his

clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a hume name by his clan-fam at some point in his development; it’s a kind of maturity-marker. Dinky says they get that name the first time they successfully whack off, but that’s just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don’t know and it doesn’t matter, but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There’s one fellow who

looks like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who suffered from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and psychopaths, but his name is Thomas Carlyle. There’s another one named Beowulf and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez.”

Susannah, a Bleecker Street folkie from way back, put her face in her hands to stifle a gust of giggles.

“Anyway, I told him that Trampas was a character from a famous Western novel

calledThe Virginian . Only second banana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got the one line from the book everyone remembers: ‘Smilewhen you say that!’ It tickled our

Trampas, and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book over cups of drug-store coffee.

“We became friends. I’d tell him what was going on in our little community of Breakers, and he’d tell me all sorts of interesting but innocent things about what was going on over

onhis side of the fence. He also complained about his eczema, which made his head itch terribly. He kept lifting his hat—this little beanie-type of thing, almost like ayarmulke, only made of denim—to scratch underneath. He claimed that was the worst place of all, even worse than down there on your makie-man. And little by little, I realized that every

time he lifted his beanie to scratch, I could read his thoughts. Not just the ones on top butall of them. If I was fast—and I learned to be—I could pick and choose, exactly the way you’d pick and choose articles in an encyclopedia by turning the pages. Only it wasn’t really like that; it was more like someone turning a radio on and off during a news broadcast.”

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, and took another graham cracker. He wished mightily for milk to dip them in; graham crackers without milk were almost like Oreos without the white stuff in the middle.

“Imagine turning a radio or a TV on full-blast,” Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, “and then turning it off again…justasquick.” He purposely ran this together, and they all smiled—even Roland. “That’ll give you the idea. Now I’ll tell you what I learned. I suspect you know it already, but I just can’t take the risk that you don’t. It’s too important.

“There is a Tower, lady and gentlemen, as youmust know. At one time six beams crisscrossed there, both taking power from it—it’s some kind of unimaginable

power-source—and lending support, the way guy-wires support a radio tower. Four of

these Beams are now gone, the fourth very recently. The only two remaining are the Beam of the Bear, Way of the Turtle—Shardik’s Beam—and the Beam of the Elephant, Way of the Wolf—some call that one Gan’s Beam.

“I wonder if you can imagine my horror at discovering what I’d actually been doing in The Study. When I’d been scratching that innocent itch. Although I knew all along that it was

something important,knew it.

“And there was something worse, something Ihadn’t suspected, something that applied only to me. I’d known that I was different in some ways; for one thing, I seemed to be the only Breaker with an ounce of compassion in my makeup. When they’ve got the mean reds,

I am, as I told you, the one they come to. Pimli Prentiss, the Master, married Tanya and Joey Rastosovich—insisted on it, wouldn’t hear a word against the idea, kept saying that it

was his privilege and his responsibility, he was just like the captain on an old

cruise-ship—and of course they let him do it. But afterward, they came to my rooms and

Tanya said, ‘Youmarry us, Ted. Then we’ll really be married.’

“And sometimes I ask myself, ‘Did you think that was all it was? Before you started visiting with Trampas, and listening every time he lifted up his cap to scratch, did you truly

think that having a little pity and a little love in your soul were the only things that set you apart from the others? Or were you fooling yourself about that, too?’

“I don’t know for sure, but maybe I can find myself innocent on that particular charge. I

really did not understand that my talent goes far beyond progging and Breaking. I’m like a microphone for a singer or a steroid for a muscle. I…hypethem. Say there’s a unit of

force—call itdarks, all right? In The Study, twenty or thirty people might be able to put out fifty darks an hour without me.With me? Maybe it jumps to fivehundred darks an hour. And it jumps all at once.

“Listening to Trampas’s head, I came to see that they considered me the catch of the century, maybe of all time, the one truly indispensable Breaker. I’d already helped them to snap one Beam and I was cuttingcenturies off their work on Shardik’s Beam. And when Shardik’s Beam snaps, lady and gentlemen, Gan’s can only last a little while. And when Gan’s Beam also snaps, the Dark Tower will fall, creation will end, and the very Eye of

Existence will turn blind.

“How I ever kept Trampas from seeing my distress I don’t know. And I’ve reason to believe that I didn’t keep as complete a poker face as I thought at the time.

“I knew I had to get out. And that was when Sheemie came to me the first time. Ithink he’d been reading me all along, but even now I don’t know for sure, and neither does Dinky. All I know is that one night he came to my room and thought to me, ‘I’ll make a hole for you, sai, if you want, and you can go boogie-bye-bye.’ I asked him what he meant, and he just looked at me. It’s funny how much a single look can say, isn’t it?Don’t insult my intelligence. Don’t waste my time. Don’t waste your own . I didn’t read those thoughts in his mind, not at all. I saw them on his face.”

Roland grunted agreement. His brilliant eyes were fixed on the turning reels of the tape recorder.

“Idid ask him where the hole would come out. He said he didn’t know—I’d be taking luck of the draw. All the same, I didn’t think it over for long. I was afraid that if I did, I’d find reasons to stay. I said, ‘Go ahead, Sheemie—send me boogie-bye-bye.’

“He closed his eyes and concentrated, and all at once the corner of my room was gone. I could see cars going by. They were distorted, but they were actual American cars. I didn’t argue or question any more, I just went for it. I wasn’t completely sure I could go through into that other world, but I’d reached a point where I hardly even cared. I thought dying

might be the best thing I could do. It would slow them down, at least.

“And just before I took the plunge, Sheemie thought to me, ‘Look for my friend Will Dearborn. His real name is Roland. His friends are dead, but I know he’s not, because I can hear him. He’s a gunslinger, and he has new friends. Bring them here and they’ll make the

bad folks stop hurting the Beam, the way he made Jonas and his friends stop when they were going to kill me.’ For Sheemie, this was a sermon.

“I closed my eyes and went through. There was a brief sensation of being turned on my head, but that was all. No chimes, no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared to the

Santa Mira doorway. I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy highway. There was a piece of newspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked it up and saw I’d landed in

April of 1960, almost five years after Armitage and his friends herded us through the door

in Santa Mira, on the other side of the country. I was looking at a piece of the

HartfordCourant, you see. And the road turned out to be the Merritt Parkway.”

“Sheemie can make magic doors!” Roland cried. He had been cleaning his revolver as he listened, but now he put it aside. “That’s what teleporting is!That’s what it means! ”

“Hush, Roland,” Susannah said. “This must be his Connecticut adventure. I want to hear this part.”

Eleven

But none of them hear about Ted’s Connecticut adventure. He simply calls it “a story for another day” and tells his listeners that he was caught in Bridgeport while trying to

accumulate enough cash to disappear permanently. The low men bundled him into a car, drove him to New York, and took him to a ribjoint called the Dixie Pig. From there to Fedic, and from Fedic to Thunderclap Station; from the station right back to the Devar-Toi, oh Ted, so good to see you, welcome back.

The fourth tape is now three-quarters done, and Ted’s voice is little more than a croak.

Nevertheless, he gamely pushes on.

“I hadn’t been gone long, but over here time had taken one of its erratic slips forward. Humma o’ Tego was out, possibly because of me, and Prentiss of New Jersey, the ki’-dam, was in. He and Finli interrogated me in the Master’s suite a good many times. There was no

physical torture—I guess they still reckoned me too important to chance spoiling me—but

there was a lot of discomfort and plenty of mind-games. They also made it clear that if I tried to run again, my Connecticut friends would be put to death. I said, ‘Don’t you boys get it? If I keep doing my job, they’re going out, anyway.Everybody’sgoing out, with the possible exception of the one you call the Crimson King.’

“Prentiss steepled his fingers in the annoying way he has and said, ‘That may be or may not be true, sai, but if it is,wewon’t suffer when we “go out,” as you put it. Little Bobby and little Carol, on the other hand…not to mention Carol’s mother and Bobby’s friend, Sully-John…’ He didn’t have to finish. I still wonder if they knew how terribly frightened they’d made me with that threat against my young friends. And how terribly angry.

“All their questions came down to two things they really wanted to know: Why had I run,

and who helped me do it. I could have fallen back on the old name–rank–serial number routine, but decided to chance being a bit more expansive. I’d wanted to run, I said, because I’d gotten a glimmering from some of the can-toi guards about what we were really doing, and I didn’t like the idea. As for how I’d gotten out, I told them I didn’t know.

I went to sleep one night, I said, and just woke up beside the Merritt Parkway. They went from scoffing at this story to semi-believing it, mostly because I never varied it a single jot or tittle, no matter how many times they asked. And of course they already knew how powerful I was, and in ways that were different from the others.

“‘Do you think you’re a teleport in some subconscious way, sai?’ Finli asked me.

“‘How could I say?’ I asked in turn—always answer a question with a question is a good rule to follow during interrogation, I think, as long as it’s a relatively soft interrogation, as this one was. ‘I’ve never sensed any such ability, but of course we don’t always know what’s lurking in our subconscious, do we?’

“‘You better hope it wasn’t you,’ Prentiss said. ‘We can live with almost any wild talent

around here except that one. That one, Mr. Brautigan, would spell the end even for such a valued employee as yourself.’ I wasn’t sure I believed that, but later Trampas gave me

reason to think Prentiss might have been telling the truth. Anyway, that was my story and I never went beyond it.

“Prentiss’s houseboy, a fellow named Tassa—a hume, if it matters—would bring in

cookies and cans of Nozz-A-La—which I like because it tastes a bit like root beer—and

Prentiss would offer me all I wanted…after, that was, I told them where I’d gotten my information and how I’d escaped Algul Siento. Then the whole round of questions would

start again, only this time with Prentiss and the Wease munching cookies and drinking

Nozzie. But at some point they’d always give in and allow me a drink and a bite to eat. As interrogators, I’m afraid there just wasn’t enough Nazi in them to make me give up my secrets. They tried to prog me, of course, but…have you heard that old saying about never bullshitting a bullshitter?”

Eddie and Susannah both nod. So does Jake, who has heard his father say that during numerous conversations concerning Programming at the Network.

“I bet you have,” Ted resumes. “Well, it’s also fair to say that you can’t prog a progger, at least not one who’s gone beyond a certain level of understanding. And I’d better get to the

point before my voice gives out entirely.

“One day about three weeks after the low men hauled me back, Trampas approached me on Main Street in Pleasantville. By then I’d met Dinky, had identified him as a kindred

spirit, and was, with his help, getting to know Sheemie better. A lot was going on in addition to my daily interrogations in Warden’s House. I’d hardly even thought about Trampas since returning, but he’d thought of little else than me. As I quickly found out.

“ ‘I know the answers to the questions they keep asking you,’ he said. ‘What Idon’tknow is why you haven’t given me up.’

“I said the idea had never crossed my mind—that tattle-taleing wasn’t the way I’d been raised to do things. And besides, it wasn’t as if they were putting an electrified cattle-prod up my rectum or pulling my fingernails…although they might have resorted to such techniques, had it been anyone other than me. The worst they’d done was to make me look at the plate of cookies on Prentiss’s desk for an hour and a half before relenting and letting

me have one.

plain old ka—has decreed that this man, this guardian or whatever he is, should die. He’s stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was supposed to sing, he’s stopped, and that has

finally made him vulnerable. Butnotto the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it’s kahe’s vulnerable to. ‘He no longer sings,’ Trampas said. ‘His song, the one that matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose.’ ”

Fourteen

In the outer silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it.

Fifteen

“Trampas told me all this only so I’d understand I was no longer completely indispensable.

Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor in bringing down

Shardik’s Beam before this man’s death could cause Gan’s Beam to break.”

A pause.

“Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn’t be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn’t like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet…”

Sixteen

Roland, exasperated, twirled his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were listening could see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi guard knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some rambling, discursive sidetrack. It was understandable—the man was clearly exhausted—but there

was something here more important than everything else. Eddie knew it, too. Roland could read it on the young man’s strained face. Together they watched the remaining brown

tape—now no more than an eighth of an inch deep—melt away.

Seventeen

“…yet we’re only poor benighted humies, and I suppose we can’t know about these things, not with any degree of certainty…”

He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at last:

“I asked this magic man’s name and Trampas said, ‘I know it not, Ted, but Idoknow there’s no magic in him anymore, for he’s ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do.

If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of

Ninety-nine, which is that of ourworld, will combine to—”

But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.

Eighteen

The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that

lowfwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressedSTOP . He muttered

“Fuck!” under his breath.

“Just when it was getting interesting,” Jake said. “And those numbers again. Nineteen…and ninety-nine.” He paused, then said them together. “Nineteen-ninety-nine.” Then a third time. “1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to have her baby. Where Black Thirteen is now.”

“Keystone World, Keystone Year,” Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle, held it up to one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. “Where time always goes in one direction. Like it’s s’posed to.”

“Gancreated time,” Roland said. “This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the

void—some tales say from the sea, but both surely mean thePrim —and made the world.

Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling and that was time.”

Something was gathering in the cave. Some revelation. They all felt it, a thing as close to bursting as Mia’s belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been haunted

by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the sky, saw them written on board fences, heard them in their dreams.

Oy looked up, ears cocked, eyes bright.

Susannah said, “When Mia left the room we were in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie

Pig—room1919, it was—I fell into a kind of trance. I had dreams…jailhouse-dreams…newscasters announcing that this one, that one, and t’other

one had died—”

“You told us,” Eddie said.

She shook her head violently. “Notall of it, I didn’t. Because some of it didn’t seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy’s littleboy was dead, for instance—little John-John, the one who saluted his Daddy’s coffin when the catafalque went by. I didn’t tell you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had little John-John Kennedy died in your whens? Either of your whens?”

They shook their heads. Jake was not even sure of whom Susannah was speaking.

“But hedid . In the Keystone World, and in a when beyond any of ours. I bet it was in the

when of ’99. So dies the son of the last gunslinger, O Discordia. What I think now is that I was kind of hearing the obituary page fromThe Time Traveler’s Weekly . It was all

different times mixed together. John-John Kennedy, then Stephen King. I’d never heard of him, but David Brinkley said he wrote’Salem’s Lot . That’s the book Father Callahan was in, right?”

Roland and Eddie nodded.

“Father Callahan told us his story.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “But what—”

She overrode him. Her eyes were hazy, distant. Eyes just a look away from understanding. “And then comes Brautigan to the Ka-Tet of Nineteen, and tellshis tale. And look! Look at the tape counter!”

They leaned over. In the windows were

1999.

“I think King might have written Ted’s story, too,” she said. “Anybody want to take a guess what yearthat story showed up, orwill show up, in the Keystone World?”

“1999,” Jake said, low. “But not the part we heard. The part wedidn’t hear. Ted’s Connecticut Adventure.”

“And you met him,” Susannah said, looking at her dinh and her husband. “You met Stephen King.”

They nodded again.

“He made the Pere, he made Brautigan, he madeus, ” she said, as if to herself, then shook her head. “No. ‘All things serve the Beam.’ He…hefacilitated us.”

“Yeah.” Eddie was nodding. “Yeah, okay. That feels just about right.”

“In my dream I was in a cell,” she said. “I was wearing the clothes I had on when I got

arrested. And David Brinkley said Stephen King was dead, woe, Discordia—something like that. Brinkley said he was…” She paused, frowning. She would have demanded that

Roland hypnotize the complete recollection out of her if it had been necessary, but it turned out not to be. “Brinkley said King was killed by a minivan while walking near his home in

Lovell, Maine.”

Eddie jerked. Roland sat forward, his eyes burning. “Do you say so?”

Susannah nodded firmly.

“He bought the house on Turtleback Lane!” the gunslinger roared. He reached out and took hold of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie seemed not to even notice. “Ofcourse he did! Ka speaks

and the wind blows! He moved a little further along the Path of the Beam and bought the house where it’s thin! Where we saw the walk-ins! Where we talked to John Cullum and

then came back through! Do you doubt it?Do you doubt it so much as a single goddam bit? ”

Eddie shook his head. Of course he didn’t doubt it. It had a ring, like the one you got when you were at the carnival and hit the pedal just right with the mallet, hit it with all your force, and the lead slug flew straight to the top of the post and rang the bell up there. You got a Kewpie doll when you rang the bell, and was that because Stephen Kingthought it was a Kewpie doll? Because King came from the world where Gan started time rolling with His

holy finger? Because ifKing says Kewpie, weall say Kewpie, and we all say thankya? If he’d somehow gotten the idea that the prize for ringing the Test Your Strength bell at the

carnival was aCloo pie doll, wouldthey say Cloopie? Eddie thought the answer was yes. He thought the answer was yes just as surely as Co-Op City was in Brooklyn.

“David Brinkley said King was fifty-two. You boys met him, so do the math. Could he have been fifty-two in the year of ’99?”

“You bet your purity,” Eddie said. He tossed Roland a dark, dismayed glance. “And since nineteen’s the part we keep running into—Ted Stevens Brautigan, go on, count the

letters!—I bet it has to do with more than just the year. Nineteen—”

“It’s a date,” Jake said flatly. “Sure it is. Keystone Date in Keystone Year in Keystone

World. The nineteenth of something, in the year of 1999. Most likely a summer month, because he was out walking.”

“It’s summer over there right now,” Susannah said. “It’s June. The 6-month. Turn 6 on its head and you get 9.”

“Yeah, and spell dog backward, you get god,” Eddie said, but he sounded uneasy.

“I think she’s right,” Jake said. “I think it’s June 19th. That’s when King gets turned into

roadkill and even thechance that he might go back to work on theDark Tower story—ourstory—is kaput. Gan’s Beam is lost in the overload. Shardik’s Beam is left, but it’s already eroded.” He looked at Roland, his face pale, his lips almost blue. “It’ll snap like a toothpick.”

“Maybe it’s happened already,” Susannah said.

“No,” Roland said.

“How can you be sure?” she asked.