The Dark Tower - Stephen King [204]
“Over there, on the ground. You know him?”
King tried to smile. “Wrote him. Where’s the one that was with you before? Where’s Eddie?”
“Dead,” Roland said. “In the Devar-Toi.”
King frowned. “Devar…? I don’t know that.”
“No. That’s why we’re here. Why we had to come here. One of my friends is dead, another may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one lazy, fearful man stopped doing the job for which ka intended him.”
No traffic on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the chirping birds, the world was silent. They might have been frozen in time. Perhaps we are, Roland thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might be possible. Anything might be possible.
“I lost the Beam,” King said from where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold.
Roland reached under King and helped him to sit up. The writer cried out in pain as the swollen ball of his right hip grated in the shattered, compressed remains of its socket, but he did not protest. Roland pointed into the sky. Fat white fair-weather clouds—los ángeles, the cowpokes of Mejis had called them—hung motionless in the blue, except for those directly above them. There they hied rapidly across the sky, as if blown by a narrow wind.
“There!” Roland whispered furiously into the writer’s scraped, dirt-clogged ear. “Directly above you! All around you! Does thee not feel it? Does thee not see it?”
“Yes,” King said. “I see it now.”
“Aye, and ’twas always there. You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away. My friend had to save you for you to see it again.”
Roland’s left hand fumbled in his belt and brought out a shell. At first his fingers wouldn’t do their old, dexterous trick; they were trembling too badly. He was only able to still them by reminding himself that the longer it took him to do this, the greater the chance that they would be interrupted, or that Jake would die while he was busy with this miserable excuse for a man.
He looked up and saw the woman holding his gun on the driver of the van. That was good. She was good: why hadn’t Gan given the story of the Tower to someone like her? In any case, his instinct to keep her with them had been true. Even the infernal racket of dogs and bumbler had quieted. Oy was licking the dirt and oil from Jake’s face, while in the van, Pistol and Bullet were gobbling up the hamburger, this time without interference from their master.
Roland turned back to King, and the shell did its old sure dance across the backs of his fingers. King went under almost immediately, as most people did when they’d been hypnotized before. His eyes were still open, but now they seemed to look through the gunslinger, beyond him.
Roland’s heart screamed at him to get through this as quickly as he could, but his head knew better. You must not botch it. Not unless you want to render Jake’s sacrifice worthless.
The woman was looking at him, and so was the van’s driver as he sat in the open door of his vehicle. Sai Tassenbaum was fighting it, Roland saw, but Bryan Smith had followed King into the land of sleep. This didn’t surprise the gunslinger much. If the man had the slightest inkling of what he’d done here, he’d be apt to seize any opportunity for escape. Even a temporary one.
The gunslinger turned his attention back to the man who was, he supposed, his biographer. He started just as he had before. Days ago in his own life. Over two decades ago in the writer’s.
“Stephen King, do you see me?”
“Gunslinger, I see you very well.”
“When did you last see me?”
“When we lived in Bridgton. When my tet was young. When I was just learning how to write.” A pause, and then he gave what Roland supposed was, for him, the most important way of marking time, a thing that was different for every man: “When I was still drinking.”
“Are you deep asleep now?”
“Deep.”
“Are you under the pain?”
“Under it, yes. I thank you.”
The billy-bumbler howled again. Roland looked around, terribly