2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

The chrome post which had been outside on the night Jake and Pere Callahan had come here had been put in the lobby for safekeeping. Roland stumbled against it, but his reflexes were as quick as ever and he grabbed it before it could fall over. He read the sign on top slowly, sounding the words out and getting the sense of only one:CLOSED . The orange electricflambeaux which had lit the dining room were off but the battery-powered emergency lights were on, filling the area beyond the lobby and the bar with a flat glare. To the left was an arch and another dining room beyond it. There were no emergency lights there; that part of the Dixie Pig was as dark as a cave. The light from the main dining room seemed to creep in about four feet—just far enough to illuminate the end of a long table—and then fall dead. The tapestry of which Jake had spoken was gone. It might be in

the evidence room of the nearest police station, or it might already have joined some collector’s trove of oddities. Roland could smell the faint aroma of charred meat, vague

and unpleasant.

In the main dining room, two or three tables were overturned. Roland saw stains on the red

rug, several dark ones that were almost certainly blood and a yellowish curd that was…something else.

H’row it aside! Nasty bauble of the ’heep-God, h’row it aside if you dare!

And the Pere’s voice, echoing dimly in Roland’s ears, unafraid:I needn’t stake my faith on the challenge of such a thing as you, sai .

The Pere. Another of those he had left behind.

Roland thought briefly of the scrimshaw turtle that had been hidden in the lining of the bag they had found in the vacant lot, but didn’t waste time looking for it. If it had been here, he

thought he would have heard its voice, calling to him in the silence. No, whoever had appropriated the tapestry of the vampire-knights at dinner had very likely taken thesköldpadda as well, not knowing what it was, only knowing it was something strange and wonderful and otherworldly. Too bad. It might have come in handy.

The gunslinger moved on, weaving his way among the tables with Oy trotting at his heel.

Seventeen

He paused in the kitchen long enough to wonder what the constabulary of New York had made of it. He was willing to bet they had never seen another like it, not in this city of clean machinery and bright electric lights. This was a kitchen in which Hax, the cook he remembered best from his youth (and beneath whose dead feet he and his best friend had once scattered bread for the birds), would have felt at home. The cookfires had been out for weeks, but the smell of the meat that had been roasted here—some of the variety known as long pork—was strong and nasty. There were more signs of trouble here, as well (a scum-caked pot lying on the green tiles of the floor, blood which had been burned black on one of the stovetops), and Roland could imagine Jake fighting his way through the kitchen.

But not in panic; no, not he. Instead he had paused to demand directions of the cook’s boy.

What’s your name, cully?

Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa.

Jake had told them this part of his story, but it was not memory that spoke to Roland now. It was the voices of the dead. He had heard such voices before, and knew them for what they were.

Eighteen

Oy took the lead as he had done the last time he had been here. He could still smell Ake’s scent, faint and sorrowful. Ake had gone on ahead now, but not so very far; he was good, Ake was good, Ake would wait, and when the time came—when the job Ake had given him was done—Oy would catch up and go with him as before. His nose was strong, and he would find fresher scent than this when the time came to search for it. Ake had saved him from death, which did not matter. Ake had saved him from loneliness and shame after Oy had been cast out by the tet of his kind, and that did.

In the meantime, there was this job to finish. He led the man Olan into the pantry. The secret door to the stairs had been closed, but the man Olan felt patiently along the shelves of cans and boxes until he found the way to open it. All was as it had been, the long, descending stair dimly lit by overhead bulbs, the scent damp and overlaid with mold. He could smell the rats which scuttered in the walls; rats and other things, too, some of them bugs of the sort he had killed the last time he and Ake had come here. That had been good

killing, and he would gladly have more, if more were offered. Oy wished the bugs would show themselves again and challenge him, but of course they didn’t. They were afraid, and

they were right to be afraid, for ever had his kind stood enemy to theirs.

He started down the stairs with the man Olan following behind.

Nineteen

They passed the deserted kiosk with its age-yellowed signs (NEW YORK SOUVENIRS, LAST CHANCE, andVISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001), and fifteen minutes later—Roland

checked his new watch to be sure of the time—they came to a place where there was a good deal of broken glass on the dusty corridor floor. Roland picked Oy up so he wouldn’t cut

the pads of his feet. On both walls he saw the shattered remains of what had been glass-covered hatches of some kind. When he looked in, he saw complicated machinery. They had almost caught Jake here, snared him in some kind of mind-trap, but once again Jake had been clever enough and brave enough to get through.He survived everything but a man too stupid and too careless to do the simple job of driving his bucka on an empty road, Roland thought bitterly.And the man who brought him there—that man, too. Then Oy barked at him and Roland realized that in his anger at Bryan Smith (and at himself), he was

squeezing the poor little fellow too tightly.

“Cry pardon, Oy,” he said, and put him down.

Oy trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the scattered bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig. Here also, printed in the dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor, were the tracks he and Eddie had made

when they arrived. Again he heard a ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been the harriers’ leader.

I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. ’Tis the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee.

Roland turned the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da’ had put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared…which he did not)

and looked down into the dead face, which was already growing a crop of mold. Next to him was the stoat-head taheen whose final proclamation had beenBe damned to you, then, chary-ka . And beyond the heaped bodies of these two and their mates was the door that would take him out of the Keystone World for good.

Assuming that it still worked.

Oy trotted to it and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting, but his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed his hands against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and troubled vibration. This door was still working but might not be for much longer.

He closed his eyes and thought of his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed

(how soon before he had been promoted from the cradle he didn’t know, but surely not long), her face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with her own; daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland, singing him to sleep and dreams of those lands only children know.

Baby-bunting, baby-dear,

Baby, bring your berries here.

Chussit, chissit, chassit!

Bring enough to fill your basket!

So far I’ve traveled,he thought with his hands splayed on the ghostwood door.So far I’ve traveled and so many I’ve hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved was saved by accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there’s this much: I’ve come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if only Susannah will go

with me. Mayhap there’s still enough to fill my basket.

“Chassit,” Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap nimbly through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and then stepped through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still without a backward look.

Chapter IV:

Fedic (Two Views)

One

Look at how brilliant it is here!

When we came before, Fedic was shadowless and dull, but there was a reason for that: it wasn’t the real Fedic but only a kind of todash substitute; a place Mia knew well and

remembered well (just as she remembered the castle allure, where she went often before circumstances—in the person of Walter o’ Dim—gave her a physical body) and could thus

re-create. Today, however, the deserted village is almost too bright to look at (although we’ll no doubt see better once our eyes have adjusted from the murk of Thunderclap and

the passage beneath the Dixie Pig). Every shadow is crisp; they might have been cut from black felt and laid upon the oggan. The sky is a sharp and cloudless blue. The air is chill. The wind whining around the eaves of the empty buildings and through the battlements of Castle Discordia is autumnal and somehow introspective. Sitting in Fedic Station is an atomic locomotive—what was called a hot-enj by the old people—with the wordsSPIRIT OF TOPEKA written on both sides of the bullet nose. The slim pilot-house windows have been rendered almost completely opaque by centuries of desert grit flung against the glass, but little does that matter; theSpirit of Topeka has made her last trip, and even when shedid

run regularly, no mere hume ever guided her course. Behind the engine are only three cars.

There were a dozen when she set out from Thunderclap Station on her last run, and there were a dozen when she arrived in sight of this ghost town, but…

Ah, well, that’s Susannah’s tale to tell, and we will listen as she tells it to the man she called dinh when there was a ka-tet for him to guide. And here is Susannah herself, sitting

where we saw her once before, in front of the Gin-Puppy Saloon. Parked at the hitching rail is her chrome steed, which Eddie dubbed Suzie’s Cruisin Trike. She’s cold and hasn’t so

much as a sweater to pull close around her, but her heart tells her that her wait is almost over. And how she hopes her heart is right, for this is a haunted place. To Susannah, the whine of the wind sounds too much like the bewildered cries of the children who were brought here to have their bodies roont and their minds murdered.

Beside the rusty Quonset hut up the street (the Arc 16 Experimental Station, do ya not recall it) are the gray cyborg horses. A few more have fallen over since the last time we visited; a few more click their heads restlessly back and forth, as if trying to see the riders

who will come and untether them. But that will never happen, for the Breakers have been set free to wander and there’s no more need of children to feed their talented heads.

And now, look you! At last comes what the lady has waited for all this long day, and the

day before, and the day before that, when Ted Brautigan, Dinky Earnshaw, and a few others (not Sheemie, he’s gone into the clearing at the end of the path, say sorry) bade her

goodbye. The door of the Dogan opens, and a man comes out. The first thing she sees is that his limp is gone. Next she notices his new bluejeans and shirt. Nifty duds, but he’s

otherwise as ill-prepared for this cold weather as she is. In his arms the newcomer holds a furry animal with its ears cocked. That much is well, but the boy who should be holding the animal is absent. No boy, and her heart fills with sorrow. Not surprise, however, because she has known, just as yonder man (yonder chary man) would have known had she been the one to pass from the path.

She slips down from her seat on her hands and the stumps of her legs; she hoists herself off

the boardwalk and into the street. There she raises a hand and waves it over her head.

“Roland!” she cries. “Hey, gunslinger! I’m over here!”

He sees her and waves back. Then he bends and puts down the animal. Oy races toward

her hellbent for election, head down, ears flat against his skull, running with the speed and low-slung, leaping grace of a weasel on a crust of snow. While he’s still seven feet away

from her (seven at least), he jumps into the air, his shadow flying fleetly over the packed dirt of the street. She grabs him like a deep receiver hauling in a Hail Mary pass. The force

of his forward motion knocks the breath from her and bowls her over in a puff of dust, but the first breath she’s able to take in goes back out as laughter. She’s still laughing as he

stands with his stubby front legs on her chest and his stubby rear ones on her belly, ears up, squiggly tail wagging, licking her cheeks, her nose, her eyes.

“Let up on it!” she cries. “Let up on it, honey, ’fore you kill me!”

She hears this, so lightly meant, and her laughter stops. Oy steps off her, sits, tilts his snout at the empty blue socket of the sky, and lets loose a single long howl that tells her everything she would need to know, had she not known already. For Oy has more eloquent ways of speaking than his few words.

She sits up, slapping puffs of dust out of her shirt, and a shadow falls over her. She looks up but at first cannot see Roland’s face. His head is directly in front of the sun, and it makes

a fierce corona around him. His features are lost in blackness.

But he’s holding out his hands.

Part of her doesn’t want to take them, and do ya not kennit? Part of her would end it here and send him into the Badlands alone. No matter what Eddie wanted. No matter what Jake undoubtedly wanted, too. This dark shape with the sun blazing around its head has dragged

her out of a mostly comfortable life (oh yes, she had her ghosts—and at least one mean-hearted demon, as well—but which of us don’t?). He has introduced her first to love, then to pain, then to horror and loss. The deal’s run pretty much downhill, in other words. It

is his balefully talented hand that has authored her sorrow, this dusty knight-errant who has come walking out of the old world in his old boots and with an old death-engine on each hip. These are melodramatic thoughts, purple images, and the old Odetta, patron of The Hungry i and all-around cool kitty, would no doubt have laughed at them. But she has changed, he has changed her, and she reckons that if anyone is entitled to melodramatic thoughts and purple images, it is Susannah, daughter of Dan.

Part of her would turn him away, not to end his quest or break his spirit (only death will do those things), but to take such light as remains out of his eyes and punish him for his relentless unmeaning cruelty. But ka is the wheel to which we all are bound, and when the wheel turns we must perforce turn with it, first with our heads up to heaven and then revolving hell-ward again, where the brains inside them seem to burn. And so, instead of turning away—

Two

Instead of turning away, as part of her wanted to do, Susannah took Roland’s hands. He pulled her up, not to her feet (for she had none, although for awhile a pair had been given

her on loan) but into his arms. And when he tried to kiss her cheek, she turned her face so that his lips pressed on hers.Let him understand it’s no halfway thing, she thought, breathing her air into him and then taking his back, changed.Let him understand that if I’m in it, I’m in to the end. God help me, I’m in with him to the end.

Three

There were clothes in the Fedic Millinery & Ladies’ Wear, but they fell apart at the touch of their hands—the moths and the years had left nothing usable. In the Fedic Hotel (QUIET ROOMS, GUD BEDS) Roland found a cabinet with some blankets that would do them at

least against the afternoon chill. They wrapped up in them—the afternoon breeze was just enough to make their musty smell bearable—and Susannah asked about Jake, to have the immediate pain of it out of the way.

“The writer again,” she said bitterly when he had finished, wiping away her tears. “God damn the man.”

“My hip let go and the…and Jake never hesitated.” Roland had almost called himthe boy, as he had taught himself to think of Elmer’s son as they closed in on Walter. Given a

second chance, he had promised himself he would never do that again.

“No, of course he didn’t,” she said, smiling. “He never would. He had a yard of guts, our Jake. Did you take care of him? Did you do him right? I’d hear that part.”

So he told her, not failing to include Irene Tassenbaum’s promise of the rose. She nodded, then said: “I wish we could do the same for your friend, Sheemie. He died on the train. I’m sorry, Roland.”

Roland nodded. He wished he had tobacco, but of course there was none. He had both guns again and they were seven Oriza plates to the good, as well. Otherwise they were stocked with little-going-on-none.

“Did he have to push again, while you were coming here? I suppose he did. I knew one more might kill him. Sai Brautigan did, too. And Dinky.”

“But that wasn’t it, Roland. It was his foot.”

The gunslinger looked at her, not understanding.

“He cut it on a piece of broken glass during the fight to take Blue Heaven, and the air and dirt of that place waspoison! ” It was Detta who spat the last word, her accent so thick that the gunslinger barely understood it:Pizen! “Goddam foot swole up…toes like sausages…then his cheeks and throat went all dusky, like a bruise…he took fever…” She pulled in a deep breath, clutching the two blankets she wore tighter around her. “He was

delirious, but his head cleared at the end. He spoke of you, and of Susan Delgado. He spoke with such love and such regret…” She paused, then burst out: “Wewill go there, Roland, wewill, and if it isn’t worth it, your Tower, somehow we’ll make it worth it!”

“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll find the Dark Tower, and nothing will stand against us, and before we go in, we’ll speak their names. All of the lost.”

“Your list will be longer than mine,” she said, “but mine will be long enough.”

To this Roland did not reply, but the robot huckster, perhaps startled out of its long sleep by the sound of their voices, did. “Girls, girls,girls! ” it cried from inside the batwing doors of the Gaiety Bar and Grill. “Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t

tell, who cares, they give, you tell, girls tell, you tell…” There was a pause and then the robot huckster shouted one final word—“SATISFACTION!”—and fell silent.

“By the gods, but this is a sad place,” he said. “We’ll stay the night and then see it no more.”

“At least the sun’s out, and that’s a relief after Thunderclap, but isn’t itcold! ”

He nodded, then asked about the others.

“They’ve gone on,” she said, “but there was a minute there when I didn’t think any of us were going anywhere except to the bottom of yonder crevasse.”

She pointed to the end of the Fedic high street furthest from the castle wall.

“There are TV screens that still work in some of the traincars, and as we came up on town we got a fine view of the bridge that’s gone. We could see the ends sticking out over the

hole, but the gap in the middle had to be a hundred yards across. Maybe more. We could see the train trestle, too. That was still intact. The train was slowing down by then, but not

enough so any of us could have jumped off. By then there was no time. And the jump would likely have killed anyone who tried. We were going, oh I’m gonna say fifty miles an

hour. And as soon as we were on the trestle, the fucking thing started to creak and groan. Or to queel and grale, if you’ve ever read your James Thurber, which I suppose you have not. The train was playing music. Like Blaine did, do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“But we could hear the trestle getting ready to let go even over that. Then everything started shaking from side to side. A voice—very calm and soothing—said, ‘We are experiencing minor difficulties, please take your seats.’ Dinky was holding that little Russian girl, Dani. Ted took my hands and said, ‘I want to tell you, madam, that it has been a pleasure to know you.’ There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my seat—would have, if Ted hadn’t been holding onto me—and I thought ‘That’s it, we’re gone, please God let me be dead before whatever’s down there gets its teeth into me,’ and

for a second or two we were going backward.Backward, Roland! I could see the whole car—we were in the first one behind the loco—tilting up. There was the sound of tearing metal. Then the good oldSpirit of Topeka put on a burst of speed. Say what you want to about the old people, I know they got a lot of things wrong, but they built machines that had someballs .

“The next thing I knew, we were coasting into the station. And here comes that same soothing voice, this time telling us to look around our seats and make sure we’ve got all our

personals—our gunna, you ken. Like we were on a damn TWA flight landing at Idlewild!

It wasn’t until we were out on the platform that we saw the last nine cars of the train were gone. Thank God they were all empty.” She cast a baleful (but frightened) eye toward the far end of the street. “Hope whatever’s down there chokes on em.”

Then she brightened.

“There’s one good thing—at speeds of up to three hundred miles an hour, which is what that ain’t-we-happy voice said theSpirit of Topeka was doing, we must have left Master Spider-Boy in the dust.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Roland said.

She rolled her eyes wearily. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Ido tell you. But we’ll deal with Mordred when the time comes, and I don’t think that will be today.”

“Good.”

“Have you been beneath the Dogan again? I take it you have.”

Susannah’s eyes grew round. “Isn’t itsomething ? Makes Grand Central look like a train station someplace out in Sticksville, U.S.A. How long did it take you to find your way up?”

“If it had just been me, I’d still be wandering around down there,” Roland admitted. “Oy found the way out. I assumed he was following your scent.”

Susannah considered this. “Maybe he was. Jake’s, more likely. Did you cross a wide

passage with a sign on the wall readingSHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS

NOT ACCEPTED ?”

Roland nodded, but the fading sign painted on the wall had meant little to him. He had identified the passage which the Wolves took at the beginning of their raids by the sight of two motionless gray horses far down the passage, and another of those snarling masks. He

had also seen a moccasin he remembered quite well, one that had been made from a chunk of rubber. One of Ted’s or Dinky’s, he decided; Sheemie Ruiz had no doubt been buried in

his.

“So,” he said. “You got off the train—how many were you?”

“Five, with Sheemie gone,” she said. “Me, Ted, Dinky, Dani Rostov, and Fred Worthington—do you remember Fred?”

Roland nodded. The man in the bankerly suit.

“I gave them the guided tour of the Dogan,” she said. “As much as I could, anyway. The beds where they stole the brains out of the kids and the one where Mia finally gave birth to

her monster; the one-way door between Fedic and the Dixie Pig in New York that still works; Nigel’s apartment.