2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

“The answer is no,” King said. “Sometimes I dream of love with women. A little less now that I’m older…and probably not at all for awhile, now. That fucking guy really beat me up.”

Not near so bad as he beat up mine,Roland thought bitterly, but he didn’t say this.

“If’ee dream only of love with women, it’s a woman that may come to you.”

“Do you say so?” King sounded faintly interested.

“Yes. If she comes, she’ll be fair. She may speak to you about the ease and pleasure of the

clearing. She may call herself Morphia, Daughter of Sleep, or Selena, Daughter of the

Moon. She may offer you her arm and promise to take you there. You must refuse.”

“I must refuse.”

“Even if you are tempted by her eyes and breasts.”

“Even then,” King agreed.

“Why will you refuse, sai?”

“Because the Song isn’t done.”

At last Roland was satisfied. Mrs. Tassenbaum was kneeling by Jake. The gunslinger

ignored both her and the boy and went to the man sitting slumped behind the wheel of the motor-carriage that had done all the damage. This man’s eyes were wide and blank, his

mouth slack. A line of drool hung from his beard-stubbly chin.

“Do you hear me, sai?”

The man nodded fearfully. Behind him, both dogs had grown silent. Four bright eyes regarded the gunslinger from between the seats.

“What’s your name?”

“Bryan, do it please you—Bryan Smith.”

No, it didn’t please him at all. Here was yet one more he’d like to strangle. Another car passed on the road, and this time the person behind the wheel honked the horn as he or she passed. Whatever their protection might be, it had begun to grow thin.

“Sai Smith, you hit a man with your car or truckomobile or whatever it is thee calls it.”

Bryan Smith began to tremble all over. “I ain’t never had so much as a parking ticket,” he

whined, “and I have to go and run into the most famous man in the state! My dogs ’us fightin—”

“Your lies don’t anger me,” Roland said, “but the fear which brings them forth does. Shut thy mouth.”

Bryan Smith did as told. The color was draining slowly but steadily from his face.

“You were alone when you hit him,” Roland said. “No one here but you and the storyteller. Do you understand?”

“I was alone. Mister, are you a walk-in?”

“Never mind what I am. You checked him and saw that he was still alive.”

“Still alive, good,” Smith said. “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody, honest.”

“He spoke to you. That’s how you knew he was alive.”

“Yes!” Smith smiled. Then he frowned. “What’d he say?”

“You don’t remember. You were excited and scared.”

“Scared and excited. Excited and scared. Yes I was.”

“You drive now. As you drive, you’ll wake up, little by little. And when you get to a house or a store, you’ll stop and say there’s a man hurt down the road. A man who needs help.

Tell it back, and be true.”

“Drive,” he said. His hands caressed the steering wheel as if he longed to be gone immediately. Roland supposed he did. “Wake up, little by little. When I get to a house or store, tell them Stephen King’s hurt side o’ the road and he needs help. I know he’s still alive because he talked to me. It was an accident.” He paused. “It wasn’t my fault. He was walking in the road.” A pause. “Probably.”

Do I care upon whom the blame for this mess falls?Roland asked himself. In truth he did

not. King would go on writing either way. And Roland almost hoped hewould be blamed, for it was indeed King’s fault; he’d had no business being out here in the first place.

“Drive away now,” he told Bryan Smith. “I don’t want to look at you anymore.”

Smith started the van with a look of profound relief. Roland didn’t bother watching him go. He went to Mrs. Tassenbaum and fell on his knees beside her. Oy sat by Jake’s head, now

silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one for whom he grieved. What

the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While he had been talking to two men he didn’t like, the boy whom he loved more than all others—more than he’d loved anyone

ever in his life, even Susan Delgado—had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.

Five

“He talked to you,” Roland said. He took Jake in his arms and began to rock him gently back and forth. The ’Rizas clanked in their pouch. Already he could feel Jake’s body

growing cool.

“Yes,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“He told me to come back for you ‘after the business here is done.’ Those were his exact words. And he said, ‘Tell my father I love him.’ ”

Roland made a sound, choked and miserable, deep in his throat. He was remembering how

it had been in Fedic, after they had stepped through the door.Hile, Father, Jake had said.

Roland had taken him in his arms then, too. Only then he had felt the boy’s beating heart.

He would give anything to feel it beat again.

“There was more,” she said, “but do we have time for it now, especially when I could tell you later?”

Roland took her point immediately. The story both Bryan Smith and Stephen King knew was a simple one. There was no place in it for a lank, travel-scoured man with a big gun, nor a woman with graying hair; certainly not for a dead boy with a bag of sharp-edged plates slung over his shoulder and a machine-pistol in the waistband of his pants.

The only question was whether or not the woman would come back at all. She was not the first person he had attracted into doing things they might not ordinarily have done, but he

knew things might look different to her once she was away from him. Asking for her promise—Do you swear to come back for me, sai? Do you swear on this boy’s stilled

heart?—would do no good. She could mean every word here and then think better of it once she was over the first hill.

Yet when he’d had a chance to take the shopkeeper who owned the truck, he didn’t. Nor had he swapped her for the old man cutting the grass at the writer’s house.

“Later will do,” he said. “For now, hurry on your way. If for some reason you feel you can’t come back here, I’ll not hold it against you.”

“Where would you go on your own?” she asked him. “Where would youknow to go? This isn’t your world. Is it?”

Roland ignored the question. “If there are people still here the first time you come

back—peace officers, guards o’ the watch, bluebacks, I don’t know—drive past without stopping. Come back again in half an hour’s time. If they’re still here, drive on again. Keep doing that until they’re gone.”

“Will they notice me going back and forth?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Will they?”

She considered, then almost smiled. “The cops in this part of the world? Probably not.”

He nodded, accepting her judgment. “When you feel it’s safe, stop. You won’t see me, but I’ll see you. I’ll wait until dark. If you’re not here by then, I go.”

“I’ll come for you, but I won’t be driving that miserable excuse for a truck when I do,” she said. “I’ll be driving a Mercedes-Benz S600.” She said this with some pride.

Roland had no idea what a Mercedes-Bends was, but he nodded as though he did. “Go. We’ll talk later, after you come back.”

If you come back,he thought.

“I think you may want this,” she said, and slipped his revolver back into its holster.

“Thankee-sai.”

“You’re welcome.”

He watched her go to the old truck (which he thought she’d rather come to like, despite her

dismissive words) and haul herself up by the wheel. And as she did, he realized there was something he needed, something that might be in the truck.“Whoa!”

Mrs. Tassenbaum had put her hand on the key in the ignition. Now she took it off and looked at him inquiringly. Roland settled Jake gently back to the earth beneath which he must soon lie (it was that thought which had caused him to call out) and got to his feet. He winced and put his hand to his hip, but that was only habit. There was no pain.

“What?” she asked as he approached. “If I don’t go soon—”

It wouldn’t matter if she went at all. “Yes. I know.”

He looked in the bed of the truck. Along with the careless scatter of tools there was a square shape under a blue tarpaulin. The edges of the tarp had been folded beneath the

object to keep it from blowing away. When Roland pulled the tarp free, he saw eight or ten boxes made of the stiff paper Eddie called “card-board.” They’d been pushed together to

make the square shape. The pictures printed on the card-board told him they were boxes of beer. He wouldn’t have cared if they had been boxes of high explosive.

It was the tarpaulin he wanted.

He stepped back from the truck with it in his arms and said, “Nowyou can go.”

She grasped the key that started the engine once more, but did not immediately turn it.

“Sir,” said she, “I am sorry for your loss. I just wanted to tell you that. I can see what that boy meant to you.”

Roland Deschain bowed his head and said nothing.

Irene Tassenbaum looked at him for a moment longer, reminded herself that sometimes words were useless things, then started the engine and slammed the door. He watched her drive into the road (her use of the clutch had already grown smooth and sure), making a tight turn so she could drive north, back toward East Stoneham.

Sorry for your loss.

And now he was alone with that loss. Alone with Jake. For a moment Roland stood

surveying the little grove of trees beside the highway, looking at two of the three who had been drawn to this place: a man, unconscious, and a boy dead. Roland’s eyes were dry and

hot, throbbing in their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the

ability to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of this—after what he’d regained and then lost again—what good was any of it? So it was an immense

relief when the tears finally came. They spilled from his eyes, quieting their nearly insane blue glare. They ran down his dirty cheeks. He cried almost silently, but there was a single sob and Oy heard it. He raised his snout to the corridor of fast-moving clouds and howled a single time at them. Then he too was silent.

Six

Roland carried Jake deeper into the woods, with Oy padding at his heel. That the bumbler

was also weeping no longer surprised Roland; he had seen him cry before. And the days when he had believed Oy’s demonstrations of intelligence (and empathy) might be no more

than mimicry had long since passed. Most of what Roland thought about on that short walk was a prayer for the dead he had heard Cuthbert speak on their last campaign together, the one that had ended at Jericho Hill. He doubted that Jake needed a prayer to send him on, but the gunslinger needed to keep his mind occupied, because it did not feel strong just now; if it went too far in the wrong direction, it would certainly break. Perhaps later he could

indulge in hysteria—or even irina, the healing madness—but not now. He would not break now. He would not let the boy’s death come to nothing.

The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests (andold forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged), deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing. He had gone roughly two hundred paces from the road on a westerly line. Here he set Jake

down and looked about. He saw two rusty beer-cans and a few ejected shell-casings, probably the leavings of hunters. He tossed them further into the woods so the place would

be clean. Then he looked at Jake, wiping away his tears so he could see as clearly as possible. The boy’s face was as clean as the clearing, Oy had seen to that, but one of Jake’s

eyes was still open, giving the boy an evil winky look that must not be allowed. Roland rolled the lid closed with a finger, and when it sprang back up again (like a balky windowshade, he thought), he licked the ball of his thumb and rolled the lid shut again. This time it stayed closed.

There was dust and blood on Jake’s shirt. Roland took it off, then took his own off and put it on Jake, moving him like a doll in order to get it on him. The shirt came almost to Jake’s

knees, but Roland made no attempt to tuck it in; this way it covered the bloodstains on

Jake’s pants.

All of this Oy watched, his gold-ringed eyes bright with tears.

Roland had expected the soil to be soft beneath the thick carpet of needles, and it was. He had a good start on Jake’s grave when he heard the sound of an engine from the roadside. Other motor-carriages had passed since he’d carried Jake into the woods, but he recognized the dissonant beat of this one. The man in the blue vehicle had come back. Roland hadn’t

been entirely sure he would.

“Stay,” he murmured to the bumbler. “Guard your master.” But that was wrong. “Stay and guard your friend.”

It wouldn’t have been unusual for Oy to repeat the command (S’ay!was about the best he

could manage) in the same low voice, but this time he said nothing. Roland watched him lie down beside Jake’s head, however, and snap a fly out of the air when it came in for a landing on the boy’s nose. Roland nodded, satisfied, then started back the way he had

come.

Seven

Bryan Smith was out of his motor-carriage and sitting on the rock wall by the time Roland

got back in view of him, his cane drawn across his lap. (Roland had no idea if the cane was an affectation or something the man really needed, and didn’t care about this, either.) King

had regained some soupy version of consciousness, and the two men were talking.

“Please tell me it’s just sprained,” the writer said in a weak, worried voice.

“Nope! I’d say that leg’s broke in six, maybe seven places.” Now that he’d had time to settle down and maybe work out a story, Smith sounded not just calm but almost happy.

“Cheer me up, why don’t you,” King said. The visible side of his face was very pale, but the flow of blood from the gash on his temple had slowed almost to a stop. “Have you got a cigarette?”

“Nope,” Smith said in that same weirdly cheerful voice. “Gave em up.”

Although not particularly strong in the touch, Roland had enough of it to know this wasn’t so. But Smith only had three and didn’t want to share them with this man, who could probably afford enough cigarettes to fill Smith’s entire van with them.Besides, Smith

thought—

“Besides, folks who been in a accident ain’t supposed to smoke,” Smith said virtuously.

King nodded. “Hard to breathe, anyway,” he said.

“Prolly bust a rib or two, too. My name’s Bryan Smith. I’m the one who hit you. Sorry.”

He held out his hand and—incredibly—King shook it.

“Nothin like this ever happened to me before,” Smith said. “I ain’t ever had so much as a parkin ticket.”

King might or might not have known this for the lie it was, but chose not to comment on it; there was something else on his mind. “Mr. Smith—Bryan—was anyone else here?”

In the trees, Roland stiffened.

Smith actually appeared to consider this. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Mars bar and began to unwrap it. Then he shook his head. “Just you n me. But I called 911 and

Rescue, up to the store. They said someone was real close. Said they’d be here in no time. Don’t you worry.”

“You know who I am.”

“Godyeah! ” Bryan Smith said, and chuckled. He took a bite of the candy bar and talked through it. “Reckonized you right away. I seen all your movies. My favorite was the one about the Saint Bernard. What was that dog’s name?”

“Cujo,” King said. This was a word Roland knew, one Susan Delgado had sometimes used when they were alone together. In Mejis,cujo meant “sweet one.”

“Yeah! That was great! Scary as hell! I’m glad that little boy lived!”

“In the book he died.” Then King closed his eyes and lay back, waiting.

Smith took another bite, a humongous one this time. “I liked the show they made about the clown, too!Very cool!”

King made no reply. His eyes stayed closed, but Roland thought the rise and fall of the writer’s chest looked deep and steady. That was good.

Then a truck roared toward them and swerved to a stop in front of Smith’s van. The new motor-carriage was about the size of a funeral bucka, but orange instead of black and

equipped with flashing lights. Roland was not displeased to see it roll over the tracks of the storekeeper’s truck before coming to a stop.

Roland half-expected a robot to get out of the coach, but it was a man. He reached back inside for a black sawbones’ bag. Satisfied that everything here would be as well as it could

be, Roland returned to where he had laid Jake, moving with all his old unconscious grace: he cracked not a single twig, surprised not a single bird into flight.

Eight

Would it surprise you, after all we’ve seen together and all the secrets we’ve learned, to know that at quarter past five that afternoon, Mrs. Tassenbaum pulled Chip McAvoy’s old truck into the driveway of a house we’ve already visited? Probably not, because ka is a

wheel, and all it knows how to do is roll. When last we visited here, in 1977, both it and the

boathouse on the shore of Keywadin Pond were white with green trim. The Tassenbaums, who bought the place in ’94, had painted it an entirely pleasing shade of cream (no trim; to Irene Tassenbaum’s way of thinking, trim is for folks who can’t make up their minds).

They have also put a sign readingSUNSET COTTAGE on a post at the head of the driveway, and as far as Uncle Sam’s concerned it’s part of their mailing address, but to the

local folk, this house at the south end of Keywadin Pond will always be the old John Cullum place.

She parked the truck beside her dark red Benz and went inside, mentally rehearsing what she’d tell David about why she had the local shopkeeper’s pickup, but Sunset Cottage

hummed with the peculiar silence only empty places have; she picked up on it immediately. She had come back to a lot of empty places—apartments at the beginning, bigger and bigger houses as time went by—over the years. Not because David was out drinking or womanizing, good Lord forbid. No, he and his friends had usually been out in one garage or another, one basement workshop or another, drinking cheap wine and discount beer from the Beverage Barn, creating the Internet plus all the software necessary to support it and make it user-friendly. The profits, although most would not believe it, had only been a side-effect. The silence to which their wives so often came home was another. After awhile all that humming silence kind of got to you, made youmad, even, but not today. Today she was delighted the house was just hers.

Are you going to sleep with Marshal Dillon, if he wants you?

It wasn’t a question she even had to think about. The answer was yes, she would sleep with

him if he wanted her: sideways, backward, doggy-style, or straight-up fuck, if that was his pleasure. He wouldn’t—even if he hadn’t been grieving for his young

(sai? son?)

friend, he wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with her, she with her wrinkles, she with her hair going gray at the roots, she with the spare tire which her designer clothes could not quite conceal. The very idea was ludicrous.

But yes. If he wanted her, she would.

She looked on the fridge and there, under one of the magnets that dotted it (WE AREPOSITRONICS,BUILDING THE FUTURE ONE CIRCUIT AT A TIME, this one said) was a brief note.

Ree—

You wanted me to relax, so I’m relaxing (dammit!). I.e. gone fishin’ with Sonny Emerson, t’other end of the lake, ayuh, ayuh. Will be back by 7 unless the bugs are too bad. If I bring

you a bass, will you cook & clean?

D.

PS: Something going on at the store big enuf to rate 3 police cars. WALK-INS, maybe???? If you hear, fill me in.

She’d told himshe was going to the store this afternoon—eggs and milk that she’d of

course never gotten—and he had nodded.Yes dear, yes dear. But his note held no hint of worry, no sense that he even remembered what she’d said. Well, what else did she expect?

When it came to David, info entered ear A, info exited ear B. Welcome to GeniusWorld.

She turned the note over, plucked a pen from a teacup filled with them, hesitated, then wrote:

David,

Something has happened, and I have to be gone for awhile. 2 days at least, I think maybe 3 or 4. Please don’t worry about meand don’t call anyone.ESPECIALLY NOT POLICE . It’s

a stray cat thing.

Would he understand that? She thought he would if he remembered how they’d met. At the Santa Monica ASPCA, that had been, among the stacked rows of kennels in back: love

blooms as the mongrels yap. It sounded like James Joyce to her, by God. He had brought in a stray dog he’d found on a suburban street near the apartment where he was staying with half a dozen egghead friends. She’d been looking for a kitten to liven up what was an essentially friendless life. He’d had all his hair then. As for her, she’d thought women who

dyed theirs mildly amusing. Time was a thief, and one of the first things it took was your sense of humor.

She hesitated, then added

Love you,

Ree

Was that true any longer? Well, let it stand, either way. Crossing out what you’d written in ink always looked ugly. She put the note back on the fridge with the same magnet to hold it in place.

She got the keys to the Mercedes out of the basket by the door, then remembered the

rowboat, still tied up at the little stub of dock behind the store. It would be all right there.

But then she thought of something else, something the boy had told her.He doesn’t know about money .

She went into the pantry, where they always kept a slim roll of fifties (there were places out here in the boondocks where she would be willing to swear they’d never evenheard of

MasterCard) and took three. She started away, shrugged, went back, and took the other three, as well. Why not? She was living dangerously today.

On her way out, she paused again to look at the note. And then, for absolutely no reason she could understand, she took the Positronics magnet away and replaced it with an orange slice. Then she left.

Never mind the future. For the time being, she had enough to keep her occupied in the present.

Nine

The emergency bucka was gone, bearing the writer to the nearest hospital or infirmary, Roland assumed. Peace officers had come just as it left, and they spent perhaps half an hour

talking with Bryan Smith. The gunslinger could hear the palaver from where he was, just over the first rise. The bluebacks’ questions were clear and calm, Smith’s answers little

more than mumbles. Roland saw no reason to stop working. If the blues came back here and found him, he would deal with them. Just incapacitate them, unless they made that impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. But he would bury his dead, one way or another.

He would bury his dead.

The lovely green-gold light of the clearing deepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was doing in order to slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then

lumber off, heavy with their freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-digging the grave, the smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith’s

van-mobile. He had heard the voices of only two peace officers, which meant that, unless there had been a third blueback with nothing to say, they were allowing Smith to drive away by himself. Roland thought this rather odd, but—like the question of whether or not King was paralyzed—it was none of his matter or mind. All that mattered was this; all that