The Dark Tower (43 page)

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 I
don’t
know 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.

“‘I was angry at you at first,’ Trampas said, ‘but then I realized
—
reluctantly
—
that I might have done the same thing in your place. The first week you were back I didn’t sleep much, I can tell you. I’d lie on my bed there in Damli, expecting them to come for me at any minute. You know what they’d do if they found out it was me, don’t you?’

“I told him I did not. He said that he’d be flogged by Gaskie, Finli’s Second, and then sent raw-backed into the wastes, either to die in the Discordia or to find service in the castle of the Red King. But such a trip would not be easy. Southeast of Fedic one may also contract such things as the Eating Sickness (probably cancer, but a kind that’s very fast, very painful, and very nasty) or what they just call the Crazy. The Children of Roderick commonly suffer from both these problems, and others, as well. The minor skin diseases of Thunderclap
—
the eczema, pimples, and rashes
—
are apparently only the beginning of one’s problems in End-World. But for an exile, service in the Court of the Crimson King would be the only hope. Certainly a can-toi such as Trampas couldn’t go to the Callas. They’re closer, granted, and there’s genuine sunshine there, but you can imagine what would happen to low men or the taheen in the Arc of the Callas.”

Roland’s tet can imagine that very well.

“‘Don’t make too much of it,’ I said. ‘As that new fellow Dinky might say, I don’t put my business on the street. It’s really as simple as that. There’s no chivalry involved.’

“He said he was grateful nevertheless, then looked around and said, very low: ‘I’d pay you back for your kindness, Ted, by telling you to cooperate with them, to the extent that you can. I don’t mean you should get me in trouble, but I don’t want you to get in more trouble
yourself, either. They may not need you quite as badly as you may think.’

“And I’d have you hear me well now, lady and gentlemen, for this may be very important; I simply don’t know. All I know for certain is that what Trampas told me next gave me a terrible deep chill. He said that of all the other-side worlds, there’s one that’s unique. They call it the Real World. All Trampas seems to know about it is that it’s real in the same way Mid-World was, before the Beams began to weaken and Mid-World moved on. In America-side of this special ‘Real’ World, he says, time sometimes jerks but always runs one way: ahead. And in that world lives a man who also serves as a kind of facilitator; he may even be a mortal guardian of Gan’s Beam.”

Roland looked at Eddie, and as their eyes met, both mouthed the same word:
King.

“Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has ever protected his life. ‘They say his song has cast the circle,’ Trampas told me, ‘although no one seems to know exactly what that means.’ Now, however, ka
—
not the Red King but 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. But
not
to the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it’s
ka
he’s vulnerable to. ‘He no longer sings,’ Trampas said. ‘His song, the one that matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose.’”

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

“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 . . .”

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.

“. . . 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 I
do
know 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
our
world, will combine to
—
”

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

The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that low
fwip-fwip-fwip
sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressed
STOP
. 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.”

“Gan
created
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 the
Prim
—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—room
1919,
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. “Not
all
of it, I didn’t. Because some of it didn’t seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy’s little
boy
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 he
did
. 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 from
The 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 tells
his
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 year
that
story showed up, or
will
show up, in the Keystone World?”

“1999,” Jake said, low. “But not the part we heard. The part we
didn’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 made
us,
” she said, as if to herself, then shook her head. “No. ‘All things serve the Beam.’ He . . . he
facilitated
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. “Of
course
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 King
thought
it was a Kewpie doll? Because King came from the world where Gan started time rolling with His holy finger? Because if
King
says Kewpie, we
all
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 a
Cloo
pie doll, would
they
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 the
chance
that he might go back to work on the
Dark Tower
story—
our
story—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.