The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (14 page)

Jake fed Oy small scraps of dried deermeat from his last burrito; Susannah sat on her bedroll, legs crossed beneath her hide smock, looking dreamily into the fire; Roland lay back on his elbows, looking up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to melt away from the stars. Looking up himself, Eddie saw that Old Star and Old Mother were gone, their places taken by Polaris and the Big Dipper. This might not be his world—Takuro automobiles, the Kansas City Monarchs, and a food franchise called Boing Boing Burgers all suggested it wasn’t—but Eddie thought it was too close for comfort.
Maybe,
he thought,
the world next door.

When the bird cried in the distance again, he roused himself and looked at Roland. “You had something you were going to tell us,” he said. “A thrilling tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn’t it?”

For a moment longer the gunslinger continued to look up at the sky—now it was Roland who must find himself adrift in the constellations, Eddie realized—and then he shifted his gaze to his friends. He looked strangely apologetic, strangely uneasy. “Would you think I was cozening,” he said, “if I asked for one more day to think of these things? Or perhaps it’s a night to dream of them that I really want. They are old things, dead things, perhaps, but I . . .” He raised his hands in a kind of distracted gesture. “Some things don’t rest easy even when they’re dead. Their bones cry out from the ground.”

“There are ghosts,” Jake said, and in his eyes Eddie saw a shadow of the horror he must have felt inside the house in Dutch Hill. The horror he must have felt when the Doorkeeper came out of the wall and reached for him. “Sometimes there are ghosts, and sometimes they come back.”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Sometimes there are, and sometimes they do.”

“Maybe it’s better not to brood,” Susannah said. “Sometimes—especially when you know a thing’s going to be hard—it’s better just to get on your horse and ride.”

Roland thought this over carefully, then raised his eyes to look at her. “At tomorrow night’s fire I will tell you of Susan,” he said. “This I promise on my father’s name.”

“Do we need to hear?” Eddie asked abruptly. He was
almost astounded to hear this question coming out of his mouth; no one had been more curious about the gunslinger’s past than Eddie himself. “I mean, if it really hurts, Roland . . . hurts big-time . . . maybe . . .”

“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”

“Is it a Western?” Jake asked suddenly.

Roland looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t take your meaning, Jake. Gilead is a Barony of the Western World, yes, and Mejis as well, but—”

“It’ll be a Western,” Eddie said. “All Roland’s stories are Westerns, when you get right down to it.” He lay back and pulled his blanket over him. Faintly, from both east and west, he could hear the warble of the thinny. He checked in his pocket for the bullets Roland had given him, and nodded with satisfaction when he felt them. He reckoned he could sleep without them tonight, but he would want them again tomorrow. They weren’t done turnpikin’ just yet.

Susannah leaned over him, kissed the tip of his nose. “Done for the day, sugar?”

“Yep,” Eddie said, and laced his hands together behind his head. “It’s not every day that I hook a ride on the world’s fastest train, destroy the world’s smartest computer, and then discover that everyone’s been scragged by the flu. All before dinner, too. Shit like that makes a man tired.” Eddie smiled and closed his eyes. He was still smiling when sleep took him.

In his dream, they were all standing on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, looking over the short board fence and into the weedy vacant lot behind it. They were wearing their Mid-World clothes—a motley combination of deerskin and old shirts, mostly held together with spit and shoelaces—but none of the pedestrians hurrying by on Second seemed to notice. No one noticed the billy-bumbler in Jake’s arms or the artillery they were packing, either.

Because we’re ghosts,
Eddie thought.
We’re ghosts and we don’t rest easy.

On the fence there were handbills—one for the Sex Pistols (a reunion tour, according to the poster, and Eddie thought that was pretty funny—the Pistols was one group that was
never
going to get back together), one for a comic, Adam Sandler, that Eddie had never heard of, one for a movie called
The Craft,
about teenage witches. Beyond that one, written in letters the dusky pink of summer roses, was this:

See the
BEAR
of fearsome size!

All the
WORLD
’
S
within his eyes.

TIME
grows thin, the past’s a riddle;

The
TOWER
awaits you in the middle.

“There,”
Jake said, pointing.
“The rose. See how it awaits us, there in the middle of the lot.”

“Yes, it’s very beautiful,”
Susannah said. Then she pointed to the sign standing near the rose and facing Second Avenue. Her voice and her eyes were troubled.
“But what about that?”

According to the sign, two outfits—Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate—were going to combine on something called Turtle Bay Condominiums, said condos to be erected on this very spot. When?
COMING SOON
was all the sign had to say in that regard.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,”
Jake said.
“That sign was here before. It’s probably old as the hi—”

At that moment the revving sound of an engine tore into the air. From beyond the fence, on the Forty-sixth Street side of the lot, chugs of dirty brown exhaust ascended like bad-news smoke signals. Suddenly the boards on that side burst open, and a huge red bulldozer lunged through. Even the blade was red, although the words slashed across its scoop—
ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING
—were written in a yellow as bright as panic. Sitting in the peak-seat, his rotting face leering at them from above the controls, was the man who had kidnapped Jake from the bridge over the River Send—their old pal Gasher. On the front of his cocked-back hardhat, the words
LAMERK FOUNDRY
stood out in black. Above them, a single staring eye had been painted.

Gasher lowered the ’dozer’s blade. It tore across the lot on
a diagonal, smashing brick, pulverizing beer and soda bottles to glittering powder, striking sparks from the rocks. Directly in its path, the rose nodded its delicate head.

“Let’s see you ask some of yer silly questions now!”
this unwelcome apparition cried.
“Ask all yer wants, my dear little culls, why not? Wery fond of riddles is yer old pal Gasher! Just so you understand that, no matter what yer ask, I’m gointer run that nasty thing over, mash it flat, aye, so I will! Then back over it I’ll go! Root and branch, my dear little culls! Aye, root and branch!”

Susannah shrieked as the scarlet bulldozer blade bore down on the rose, and Eddie grabbed for the fence. He would vault over it, throw himself on the rose, try to protect it . . .

. . . except it was too late. And he knew it.

He looked back up at the cackling thing in the bulldozer’s peak-seat and saw that Gasher was gone. Now the man at the controls was Engineer Bob, from
Charlie the Choo-Choo.

“Stop!”
Eddie screamed.
“For Christ’s sake, stop!”

“I can’t, Eddie. The world has moved on, and I can’t stop. I must move on with it.”

And as the shadow of the ’dozer fell over the rose, as the blade tore through one of the posts holding up the sign (Eddie saw
COMING SOON
had changed to
COMING NOW
), he realized that the man at the controls wasn’t Engineer Bob, either.

It was Roland.

Eddie sat up in the breakdown lane of the turnpike, gasping breath he could see in the air and with sweat already chilling on his hot skin. He was sure he had screamed,
must
have screamed, but Susannah still slept beside him with only the top of her head poking out of the bedroll they shared, and Jake was snoring softly off to the left, one arm out of his own blankets and curled around Oy. The bumbler was also sleeping.

Roland wasn’t. Roland sat calmly on the far side of the dead campfire, cleaning his guns by starlight and looking at Eddie.

“Bad dreams.” Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“A visit from your brother?”

Eddie shook his head.

“The Tower, then? The field of roses and the Tower?” Roland’s face remained impassive, but Eddie could hear the subtle eagerness which always came into his voice when the subject was the Dark Tower. Eddie had once called the gunslinger a Tower junkie, and Roland hadn’t denied it.

“Not this time.”

“What, then?”

Eddie shivered. “Cold.”

“Yes. Thank your gods there’s no rain, at least. Autumn rain’s an evil to be avoided whenever one may. What was your dream?”

Still Eddie hesitated. “You’d never betray us, would you, Roland?”

“No man can say that for sure, Eddie, and I have already played the betrayer more than once. To my shame. But . . . I think those days are over. We are one,
ka-tet.
If I betray any one of you—even Jake’s furry friend, perhaps—I betray myself. Why do you ask?”

“And you’d never betray your quest.”

“Renounce the Tower? No, Eddie. Not that, not ever. Tell me your dream.”

Eddie did, omitting nothing. When he had finished, Roland looked down at his guns, frowning. They seemed to have reassembled themselves while Eddie was talking.

“So what does it mean, that I saw you driving that ’dozer at the end? That I still don’t trust you? That subconsciously—”

“Is this ology-of-the-psyche? The cabala I have heard you and Susannah speak of?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“It’s shit,” Roland said dismissively. “Mudpies of the mind. Dreams either mean nothing or everything—and when they mean everything, they almost always come as messages from . . . well, from other levels of the Tower.” He gazed at Eddie shrewdly. “And not all messages are sent by friends.”

“Something or someone is fucking with my head? Is that what you mean?”

“I think it possible. But you must watch me all the same. I bear watching, as you well know.”

“I trust you,” Eddie said, and the very awkwardness with which he spoke lent his words sincerity. Roland looked touched, almost shaken, and Eddie wondered how he ever could have thought this man an emotionless robot. Roland
might be a little short on imagination, but he had feelings, all right.

“One thing about your dream concerns me very much, Eddie.”

“The bulldozer?”

“The machine, yes. The threat to the rose.”

“Jake saw the rose, Roland. It was fine.”

Roland nodded. “In his when, the when of that particular day, the rose was thriving. But that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so. If the construction the sign spoke of comes . . . if the
bulldozer
comes . . .”

“There are other worlds than these,” Eddie said. “Remember?”

“Some things may exist only in one. In one
where,
in one
when
.” Roland lay down and looked up at the stars. “We must protect that rose,” he said. “We must protect it at all costs.”

“You think it’s another door, don’t you? One that opens on the Dark Tower.”

The gunslinger looked at him from eyes that ran with starshine. “I think it may
be
the Tower,” he said. “And if it’s destroyed—”

His eyes closed. He said no more.

Eddie lay awake late.

The new day dawned clear and bright and cold. In the strong morning sunlight, the thing Eddie had spotted the evening before was more clearly visible . . . but he still couldn’t tell what it was. Another riddle, and he was getting damned sick of them.

He stood squinting at it, shading his eyes from the sun, with Susannah on one side of him and Jake on the other. Roland was back by the campfire, packing what he called their
gunna,
a word which seemed to mean all their worldly goods. He appeared not to be concerned with the thing up ahead, or to know what it was.

How far away? Thirty miles? Fifty? The answer seemed to depend on how far could you see in all this flat land, and Eddie didn’t know the answer. One thing he felt quite sure of was that Jake had been right on at least two counts—it was some kind of building, and it sprawled across all four lanes of
the highway. It must; how else could they see it? It would have been lost in the thinny . . . wouldn’t it?

Maybe it’s standing in one of those open patches—what Suze calls “the holes in the clouds.” Or maybe the thinny ends before we get that far. Or maybe it’s a goddam hallucination. In any case, you might as well put it out of your mind for the time being. Got a little more turnpikin’ to do.

Still, the building held him. It looked like an airy Arabian Nights confection of blue and gold . . . except Eddie had an idea that the blue was stolen from the sky and the gold from the newly risen sun.

“Roland, come here a second!”

At first he didn’t think the gunslinger would, but then Roland cinched a rawhide lace on Susannah’s pack, rose, put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, and walked over to them.

“Gods, one would think no one in this band has the wit to housekeep but me,” Roland said.

“We’ll pitch in,” Eddie said, “we always do, don’t we? But look at that thing first.”

Roland did, but only with a quick glance, as if he did not even want to acknowledge it.

“It’s glass, isn’t it?” Eddie asked.

Roland took another brief look. “I wot,” he said, a phrase which seemed to mean
Reckon so, partner.

“We’ve got lots of glass buildings where I come from, but most of them are office buildings. That thing up ahead looks more like something from Disney World. Do you know what it is?”