And yet—
“Don’t move,” he said, getting up. “Oy, don’t let him move.”
“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake’s shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses. Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was always for keeps.
Roland turned to where the writer lay.
Two
When Bryan Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both, were barking and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out some new and utterly hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would split, not from the shock of what had just happened but from pure racket. She saw the man’s revolver lying on the ground and picked it up. The small part of her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by the weight of the thing. Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars gone, she could hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling… well, one howling whatever-it-was.
“Back your van off the guy you hit,” she said. “Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I’ll blow your jackass head off.”
Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot, bewildered eyes. “What kid?” he asked.
Three
When the van’s front wheel rolled slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower body was twisted unnaturally to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side. His thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock against which it had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in blood. He looked worse than Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn’t kill him, he’d probably live through this. Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller body.
“You again,” King said in a low voice.
“You remember me.”
“Yes. Now.” King licked his lips. “Thirsty.”
Roland had nothing to drink, and wouldn’t have given more than enough to wet King’s lips even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting could lead to choking. “Sorry,” he said.
“No. You’re not.” He licked his lips again. “Jake?”
“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 afraid of what it might signify. The woman had gone to Jake and was kneeling beside him. Roland was relieved to see Jake put an arm around her neck and draw her head down so he could speak into her ear. If he was strong enough to do that—
Stop it! You saw the changed shape of him under his shirt. You can’t afford to waste time on hope.
There was a cruel paradox here: because he loved Jake, he had to leave the business of Jake’s dying to Oy and a woman they had met less than an hour ago.
Never mind. His business now was with King. Should Jake pass into the clearing while his back was turned… if ka will say so, let it be so.
Roland summoned his will and concentration. He focused them to a burning point, then turned his attention to the writer once more. “Are you Gan?” he asked abruptly, not knowing why this question came to him—only that it was the right question.
“No,” King said at once. Blood ran into his mouth from the cut on his head and he spat it out, never blinking. “Once I thought I was, but that was just the booze. And pride, I suppose. No writer is Gan—no painter, no sculptor, no maker of music. We are kas-ka Gan. Not ka-Gan but kas-ka Gan. Do you understand? Do you… do you ken?”