The waste lands - Stephen King [150]
As he told this part of his story for the second time, speaking very slowly now, Jake found that what the gunslinger had said was true: he could remember everything. His recall improved until he almost seemed to be reliving the experience. He told them of the sign which said that a building called Turtle Bay Condominiums was slated to stand on the spot where Tom and Gerry’s had once stood. He even remembered the little poem which had been spray-painted on the fence, and recited it for them:
“See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
If you want to run and play,
Come along the BEAM today.”
Susannah murmured, “His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind . . . isn’t that how it went, Roland?”
“What?” Jake asked. “How what went?”
“A poem I learned as a child,” Roland said. “It’s another connection, one that really tells us something, although I’m not sure it’s anything we need to know . . . still, one never knows when a little understanding may come in handy.”
“Twelve portals connected by six Beams,” Eddie said. “We started at the Bear. We’re only going as far as the middle—to the Tower—but if we went all the way to the other end, we’d come to the Portal of the Turtle, wouldn’t we?”
Roland nodded. “I’m sure we would.”
“Portal of the Turtle,” Jake said thoughtfully, rolling the words in his mouth, seeming to taste them. Then he finished by telling them again about the gorgeous voice of the choir, his realization that there were faces and stories and histories everywhere, and his growing belief that he had stumbled on something very like the core of all existence. Last of all, he told them again about finding the key and seeing the rose. In the totality of his recall, Jake began to weep, although he seemed unaware of it.
“When it opened,” he said, “I saw the middle was the brightest yellow you ever saw in your life. At first I thought it was pollen and it only looked bright because everything in that lot looked bright. Even looking at the old candy-wrappers and beer-bottles was like looking at the greatest paintings you ever saw. Only then I realized it was a sun. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it was. Only it was more than one. It was—”
“It was all suns,” Roland murmured. “It was everything real.”
“Yes! And it was right—but it was wrong, too. I can’t explain how it was wrong, but it was. It was like two heartbeats, one inside of the other, and the one inside had a disease. Or an infection. And then I fainted.”
23
“YOU SAW THE SAME thing at the end of your dream, Roland, didn’t you?” Susannah asked. Her voice was soft with awe. “The blade of grass you saw near the end of it . . . you thought that blade was purple because it was splattered with paint.”
“You don’t understand,” Jake said. “It really was purple. When I was seeing it the way it really was, it was purple. Like no grass I ever saw before. The paint was just camouflage. The way the doorkeeper camouflaged itself to look like an old deserted house.”
The sun had reached the horizon. Roland asked Jake if he would now show them Charlie the Choo-Choo and then read it to them. Jake handed the book around. Both Eddie and Susannah looked at the cover for a long time.
“I had this book when I was a little kid,” Eddie said at last. He spoke in the flat tones of utter surety. “Then we moved from Queens to Brooklyn—I wasn’t even four years old—and I lost it. But I remember the picture on the cover. And I felt the same way you do, Jake. I didn’t like it. I didn’t trust it.”
Susannah raised her eyes to look at Eddie. “I had it, too—how could I ever forget the little