The Dark Tower (35 page)

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 doll-house 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. They
felt
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 that
did
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of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a leather-upholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to swallow him, and appeared to read.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 not
quite
as tired as some thought—looking up at them.

With a ghost of his own smile.

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 phrase
hinky-di-di
with a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child’s phrase, almost, like
allee-allee-in-free
or
eenie-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-out
certainty
—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 . . . just
suppose,
now . . . someone was actually
channeling
that feeling? Sending it up to them like a lullabye?
Go to sleep, Pimli, go to sleep, Finli, go to sleep all of you good children . . .

Ridiculous idea, totally paranoid. Still, when another double-boom of thunder rolled out of what might still be the southeast—from the direction of Fedic and the Discordia, anyway—Pimli Prentiss sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.

Finli had spoken of doubling the guard tonight, both in the watchtowers and along the fences. Perhaps tomorrow they might triple it. Just to be on the safe side. And because complacency this close to the end would be a very bad thing, indeed.

Pimli got out of bed, a tall man with a hairy slab
of gut, now wearing blue pajama pants and nothing else. He pissed, then knelt in front of the toilet’s lowered lid, folded his hands, and prayed until he felt sleepy. He prayed to do his duty. He prayed to see trouble before trouble saw him. He prayed for his Ma, just as Jim Jones had prayed for his as he watched the line move toward the tub of poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to little more than a senile mutter, then went back to bed, calm again. His last thought before drifting off was about tripling the guard first thing in the morning, and that was the first thing he thought of when he woke to a room awash in artificial sunlight. Because you had to take care of the eggs when you were almost home.

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 read
PROPERTY 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 marked
DANGER! 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 for
Return 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 the
Prim
. “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
let
me fall.

“Holy
shit!
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
.