2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

One

The fact of his own almost unearthly speed of hand never occurred to Jake Chambers. All

he knew was that when he staggered out of the Devar-Toi and back into America, his shirt—belled out into a pregnant curve by Oy’s weight—was pulling out of his jeans. The bumbler, who never had much luck when it came to passing between the worlds (he’d

nearly been squashed by a taxicab the last time), tumbled free. Almost anyone else in the world would have been unable to prevent that fall (and in fact it very likely wouldn’t have hurt Oy at all), but Jake wasn’t almost anyone. Ka had wanted him so badly that it had even found its way around death to put him at Roland’s side. Now his hands shot out with a

speed so great that they momentarily blurred away to nothing. When they reappeared, one was curled into the thick shag at the nape of Oy’s neck and the other into the shorter fur at

the rump end of his long back. Jake set his friend down on the pavement. Oy looked up at

him and gave a single short bark. It seemed to express not one idea but two:thanks, anddon’t do that again.

“Come on,” Roland said. “We have to hurry.”

Jake followed him toward the store, Oy falling in at his accustomed place by the boy’s left heel. There was a sign hanging in the door from a little rubber suction cup. It readWE’RE

OPEN, SO COME IN N VISIT , just as it had in 1977. Taped in the window to the left of the door was this:

COME ONE COME ALL TO THE

1st CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH BEANHOLE BEAN SUPPER Saturday June 19th, 1999 Intersection Route 7 & Klatt Road

PARISH HOUSE (In Back)

5 PM–7:30 PM

AT 1st CONGO

“WE’RE ALWAYS GLAD TO SEEYA, NAYBAH!”

Jake thought,The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They’ll already be putting down the tablecloths and setting the places.

Taped to the right of the door was a more startling message to the public:

1st Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins Will YOU join us for Worship?

Sunday services: 10 AM

Thursday services: 7 PM

EVERY WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7–9 PM! Games! Music! Scripture!

***AND***

NEWS OF WALK-INS!

Hey, Teens!

“Be There or Be Square!!!”

“We Seek the Doorway to Heaven—Will You Seek With Us?”

Jake found himself thinking of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might have been attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but hisheart —

“Hurry, Jake,” Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the door.

Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of Took’s on the

Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things nice.

He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least two things with him, after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, and the bag of Orizas was still slung over his shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a dozen plates remaining inside would be within easy reach of his right hand.

Two

Wendell “Chip” McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of

sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the door rang, once more turning Chip’s life upside down (You’ve turned turtle,the oldtimers used to say when

your car rolled in the ditch), they had been discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on Keywadin Pond…or rather Mrs.Tassenbaum had been discussing it.

Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot. She could afford a cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day in the same reverential

tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda…he supposed…if you didn’t mind the makeup and the

hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt perfectly justified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale…a trick he had

learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if

they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try

doingthat in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine feet high. This wasn’t February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum—a Daughter of Abraham

if he had ever seen one—was not from these parts. No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfectly comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another

term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he hadn’tentirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pussy than a

toilet seat.

“And nowGore expects to just…ride in on his coattails!” Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging

for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there

Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). “Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who reallydid invent the Internet!” She looked up (Chip’s thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and

gave Chip a roguish little smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two register. “I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!”

Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white

paper. He was glad to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from

Viking Motors (“The Boys with the Toys”) in Oxford himself.

“I know what you mean! That fella Gore, too slick!” Mrs. Tassenbaum was nodding enthusiastically, and so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. “His

hair, for instance—how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his—”

That was when the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A goddamned lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell “Chip” McAvoy knew the man who’d caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through the door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn’t he always known, deep in his heart’s most secret place, that the man with the terrible blue eyes hadn’t finished his

business and would be back?

Back for him?

That idea broke his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along

the inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store—the place was bigger and fancier than it had been in ’77, thank God for his father’s insistence on

extravagant insurance coverage—and Mrs. Tassenbaum uttered a piercing scream. Three or four people who had been browsing the aisles turned with expressions of astonishment, and one of them hit the floor in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda

Beemer, eldest daughter of one of the two women who’d been killed in here on That Day.

Then it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He heard a bullet buzz over his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop, hands raised.

“Don’t shoot, mister!” he heard himself bawl in the thin, wavering voice of an old man. “Take whatever’s in the register but don’t shoot me!”

“Turn around,” said the voice of the man who had turned Chip’s world turtle on That Day, the man who’d almost gotten him killed (he’d been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two weeks, by the living Jesus) and had now reappeared like an old monster from some child’s closet. “The rest of you on the floor, but you turn around, shopkeeper. Turn around and see

me.

“See me very well.”

Three

The man swayed from side to side, and for a moment Roland thought he would faint instead of turning. Perhaps some survival-oriented part of his brain suggested that fainting

was more likely to get him killed, for the shopkeeper managed to keep his feet anddid finally turn and face the gunslinger. His dress was eerily similar to what he’d been wearing the last time Roland was here; it could have been the same black tie and butcher’s apron,

tied up high on his midriff. His hair was still slicked back along his skull, but now it was

wholly white instead of salt-and-pepper. Roland remembered the way blood had dashed back from the left side of the shopkeeper’s temple as a bullet—one fired by Andolini

himself, for all the gunslinger knew—grooved him. Now there was a grayish knot of

scar-tissue there. Roland guessed the man combed his hair in a way that would display that mark rather than hide it. He’d either had a fool’s luck that day or been saved by ka. Roland

thought ka the more likely.

Judging from the sick look of recognition in the shopkeeper’s eyes, he thought so, too.

“Do you have a cartomobile, a truckomobile, or a tack-see?” Roland asked, holding the barrel of his gun on the shopkeeper’s middle.

Jake stepped up beside Roland. “What are you driving?” he asked the shopkeeper. “That’s what he means.”

“Truck!” the shopkeeper managed. “International Harvester pickup! It’s outside in the lot!” He reached under his apron so suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting him. The shopkeeper—mercifully—didn’t seem to notice. All of the store’s customers were now lying prone, including the woman who’d been at the counter. Roland could smell

the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach rumbled. He was tired,

hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many things to think about, too many by far. His mind couldn’t keep up. Jake would have said he needed to “take a time-out,” but he

didn’t see any time-outs in their immediate future.

The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His fingers were trembling, and the keys

jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting in the windows struck them and bounced complicated reflections into the gunslinger’s eyes. First the man in the white apron had

plunged a hand out of sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding

up a bunch of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he weretrying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too, hadn’t it? The storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that widower’s hump in his back) had followed him and Eddie from place to place like a cat who won’t stop getting under your feet, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying all around them (just as he’d seemed

oblivious of the one that grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered, he had talked about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while he waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often safe from harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out of the world.

“Take the truck, take it and go!” the shopkeeper was telling him. “It’s yours! I’m giving it to you! Really!”

“If you don’t stop flashing those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I’ll take is your breath,” Roland said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed

that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of four, which meant they’d been America-side

for nine minutes already. Time was racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was almost certainly on his afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn’t know it.

Or had it happened already? They—Roland, anyway—had always assumed that the writer’s death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the

impact of his death would be more gradual.

“How far from here to Turtleback Lane?” Roland rapped at the storekeeper.

The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror. Never in his life had Roland felt more like shooting a man…or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a

goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.

Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke. She was looking up at Roland and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. “That’s in Lovell, mister. It’s about five miles from here.”

One look in her eyes—large and brown, fearful but not panicky—and Roland decided this was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was—

He turned to Jake. “Can you drive the shopkeeper’s truck five miles?”

Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn’t afford to risk ultimate failure by trying to do a thing he—city boy that he was—had never done in his life.

“No,” Jake said. “I don’t think so. What about you?”

Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum’s car. It didn’t look that hard…but there

was his hip to consider. Rosa had told him that dry twist moved fast—like a fire driven by strong winds, she’d said—and now he knew what she’d meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn

Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if

the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He’d watched how Eddie

manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up and the one that made it slow down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of the right hip was always rolling in its socket.

He didn’t think he could do that. Not with any degree of safety.

“I think not,” he said. He took the keys from the shopkeeper, then looked at the woman lying in front of the meat-counter. “Stand up, sai,” he said.

Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on her feet, Roland gave her the keys.I keep meeting useful people in here, he thought.If this one’s as good as Cullum

turned out to be, we might still be all right .

“You’re going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell,” Roland said.

“To Turtleback Lane,” she said.

“You say true, I say thankya.”

“Are you going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?”

“Not unless you dawdle,” Roland said.

She considered this, then nodded. “Then I won’t. Let’s go.”

“Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum,” the shopkeeper told her faintly as she started for the door.

“If I don’t come back,” she said, “you just remember one thing: it was my husband who

invented the Internet—him and his friends, partly at CalTech and partly in their own garages.Not Albert Gore.”

Roland’s stomach rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed away from him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman’s

pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth. The rest he handed to Jake, who ate two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the meat with great interest.

“I’ll give you your share when we get in the truck,” Jake promised.

“Ruck,” Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis: “Share!”

“Holy jumping Jesus Christ,” the shopkeeper said.

Four

The Yankee shopkeeper’s accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn’t. It was a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn’t driven a standard

since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had never driven one of those.

Jake was sitting beside her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing turkey) on his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain in his leg. Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition. The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a

colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake’s lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey

along with a word he had learned from Eddie.

Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. “Did that creature just sayfuck, young man?”

“Never mind what he said,” Jake replied. His voice was shaking. The hands of the Boar’s

Head clock in the window now stood at five to four. Like Roland, the boy had never had a sense of time as a thing so little in their control. “Use the clutch and get usout of here.”

Luckily, the shifting pattern had been embossed on the head of the stick shift and was still faintly visible. Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch with a sneakered foot, ground the

gears hellishly, and finally found Reverse. The truck backed out onto Route 7 in a series of jerks, then stalled halfway across the white line. She turned the ignition key, realizing she’d

once more forgotten the clutch just a little too late to prevent another series of those spastic leaps. Roland and Jake were now bracing their hands against the dusty metal dashboard, where a faded sticker proclaimedAMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE ! in red white and blue. This series of jerks was actually a good thing, for at that moment a truck loaded with

logs—it was impossible for Roland not to think of the one that had crashed the last time they’d been here—crested the rise to the north of the store. Had the pickup not jerked its way back into the General Store’s parking lot (bashing the fender of a parked car as it came

to a stop), they would have been centerpunched. And very likely killed. The logging truck swerved, horn blaring, rear wheels spuming up dust.

The creature in the boy’s lap—it looked to Mrs. Tassenbaum like some weird mixture of dog and raccoon—barked again.

Fuck. She was almost sure of it.

The storekeeper and the other patrons were lined up on the other side of the glass, and she suddenly knew what a fish in an aquarium must feel like.

“Lady, can you drive this thing or not?” the boy yelled. He had some sort of bag over his shoulder. It reminded her of a newsboy’s bag, only it was leather instead of canvas and

there appeared to be plates inside.

“I can drive it, young man, don’t you worry.” She was terrified, and yet at the same time…was sheenjoying this? She almost thought she was. For the last eighteen years she’d been little more than the great David Tassenbaum’s ornament, a supporting character in his increasingly famous life, the lady who said “Try one ofthese ” as she passed aroundhors

d’oeuvres at parties. Now, suddenly, she was at the center of something, and she had an idea it was something very important indeed.

“Take a deep breath,” said the man with the hard sunburned face. His brilliant blue eyes fastened upon hers, and when they did it was hard to think of anything else. Also, the

sensation was pleasant.If this is hypnosis, she thought,they ought to teach it in the public schools . “Hold it, then let it out. And thendrive us, for your father’s sake.”

She pulled in a deep breath as instructed, and suddenly the day seemed brighter—nearly brilliant. And she could hear faint singing voices. Lovely voices. Was the truck’s radio on,

tuned to some opera program? No time to check. But it was nice, whatever it was. As calming as the deep breath.

Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch and re-started the engine. This time she found Reverse on the first try and backed into the road almost smoothly. Her first effort at a forward gear netted her Second instead of First and the truck almost stalled when she eased the clutch out, but then the engine seemed to take pity on her. With a wheeze of loose pistons and a manic rapping from beneath the hood, they began rolling north toward the Stoneham-Lovell line.

“Do you know where Turtleback Lane is?” Roland asked her. Ahead of them, near a sign markedMILLION DOLLAR CAMPGROUND , a battered blue minivan swung out onto the road.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re sure?” The last thing the gunslinger wanted was to waste precious time casting about for the back road where King lived.

“Yes. We have friends who live there. The Beckhardts.”

For a moment Roland could only grope, knowing he’d heard the name but not where. Then he got it. Beckhardt was the name of the man who owned the cabin where he and Eddie had had their final palaver with John Cullum. He felt a fresh stab of grief in his heart at the

thought of Eddie as he’d been on that thundery afternoon, still so strong and vital.

“All right,” he said. “I believe you.”

She glanced at him across the boy sitting between. “You’re in one hell of a hurry,

mister—like the white rabbit inAlice in Wonderland . What very important date are you almost too late for?”

Roland shook his head. “Never mind, just drive.” He looked at the clock on the dashboard, but it didn’t work, had stopped in the long-ago with the hands pointed at (of course) 9:19.

“It may not be too late yet,” he said, while ahead of them, unheeded, the blue van began to pull away. It strayed across the white line of Route 7 into the southbound lane and Mrs. Tassenbaum almost committed abon mot —something about people who started drinking before five—but then the blue van pulled back into the northbound lane, breasted the next hill, and was gone toward the town of Lovell.

Mrs. Tassenbaum forgot about it. She had more interesting things to think about. For instance—

“You don’t have to answer what I’m going to ask now if you don’t want to,” she said, “but I admit that I’m curious: are you boys walk-ins?”

Five

Bryan Smith has spent the last couple of nights—along with his rottweilers, litter-twins he

has named Bullet and Pistol—in the Million Dollar Campground, just over the Lovell-Stoneham line. It’s nice there by the river (the locals call the rickety wooden

structure spanning the water Million Dollar Bridge, which Bryan understands is a joke, and a pretty funny one, by God). Also, folks—hippie-types down from the woods in Sweden,

Harrison, and Waterford, mostly—sometimes show up there with drugs to sell. Bryan likes to get mellow, likes to getdown,may it do ya, and he’s down this Saturday afternoon…not

a lot, not the way he likes, but enough to give him a good case of the munchies. They have those Marses’ Bars at the Center Lovell Store. Nothing better for the munchies than those.

He pulls out of the campground and onto Route 7 without so much as a glance in either direction, then says “Whoops, forgot again!” No traffic, though. Later on—especially after the Fourth of July and until Labor Day—there’ll be plenty of traffic to contend with, even out here in the boonies, and he’ll probably stay closer to home. He knows he isn’t much of a driver; one more speeding ticket or fender-bender and he’ll probably lose his license for

six months. Again.

No problem this time, though; nothing coming but an old pick-em-up, and that baby’s almost half a mile back.

“Eat my dust, cowboy!” he says, and giggles. He doesn’t know why he saidcowboywhen the word in his mind was muthafuckah,as in eat my dust muthafuckah,but it sounds good. It

sounds right. He sees he’s drifted into the other lane and corrects his course. “Back on the road again!” he cries, and lets loose another highpitched giggle. Back on the road againis a

good one, and he always uses it on girls. Another good one is when you twist the wheel from side to side, making your car loop back and forth, and you say Ahh jeez, musta had

too much cough-syrup!He knows lots of lines like this, even once thought of writing a book called Crazy Road Jokes,wouldn’t thatbe a sketch, Bryan Smith writing a book just like

that guy King over in Lovell!

He turns on the radio (the van yawing onto the soft shoulder to the left of the tarvy,

throwing up a rooster-tail of dust, but not quite running into the ditch) and gets Steely Dan, singing “Hey Nineteen.” Good one! Yassuh,wickedgood one! He drives a little faster in

response to the music. He looks into the rearview mirror and sees his dogs, Bullet and Pistol, looking over the rear seat, bright-eyed. For a moment Bryan thinks they’re looking

at him, maybe thinking what a good guy he is, then wonders how he can be so stupid.

There’s a Styrofoam cooler behind the driver’s seat, and a pound of fresh hamburger in it.

He means to cook it later over a campfire back at Million Dollar. Yes, and a couple more

Marses’ Bars for dessert, by the hairy old Jesus! Marses’ Bars are wickedgood!

“You boys ne’mine that cooler,” Bryan Smith says, speaking to the dogs he can see in the rear-view mirror. This time the minivan pitches instead of yawing, crossing the white line

as it climbs a blind grade at fifty miles an hour. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your point of view—nothing is coming the other way; nothing puts a stop to Bryan Smith’s

northward progress.

“You ne’mine that hamburg, that’s my supper.” He sayssuppah,as John Cullum would, but the face looking back at the bright-eyed dogs from the rearview mirror is the face of Sheemie Ruiz. Almost exactly.

Sheemie could be Bryan Smith’s litter-twin.

Six

Irene Tassenbaum was driving the truck with more assurance now, standard shift or not.

She almost wished she didn’t have to turn right a quarter of a mile from here, because that would necessitate using the clutch again, this time to downshift. But that was Turtleback Lane right up ahead, and Turtleback was where these boys wanted to go.

Walk-ins! They said so, andshe believed it, but who else would? Chip McAvoy, maybe, and surely the Reverend Peterson from that crazy Church of the Walk-Ins down in

Stoneham Corners, but anyone else? Her husband, for instance? Nope. Never. If you couldn’t engrave a thing on a microchip, David Tassenbaum didn’t believe it was real. She

wondered—not for the first time lately—if forty-seven was too old to think about a divorce.

She shifted back to Second without grinding the gearstoo much, but then, as she turned off the highway, had to shift all the way down to First when the silly old pickup began to grunt