Chapter VI:
On Turtleback Lane
One
See this, I do beg ya, and see it very well, for it’s one of the most beautiful places that still remain in America.
I’d show you a homely dirt lane running along a heavily wooded switchback ridge in western Maine, its north and south ends spilling onto Route 7 about two miles apart. Just west of this ridge, like a jeweler’s setting, is a deep green dimple in the landscape. At the bottom of it—the stone in the setting—is Kezar Lake. Like all mountain lakes, it may change its aspect half a dozen times in the course of a single day, for here the weather is beyond prankish; you could call it half-mad and be perfectly accurate. The locals will be happy to tell you about ice-cream snow flurries that came to this part of the world once in late August (that would be 1948) and once spang on the Glorious Fourth (1959). They’ll be even more delighted to tell you about the tornado that came blasting across the lake’s frozen surface in January of 1971, sucking up snow and creating a whirling mini-blizzard that crackled with thunder in its middle. Hard to believe such crazy-jane weather, but you could go and see Gary Barker, if you don’t believe me; he’s got the pictures to prove it.
Today the lake at the bottom of the dimple is blacker than homemade sin, not just reflecting the thunderheads massing overhead but amplifying their mood. Every now and then a splinter of silver streaks across that obsidian looking-glass as lightning stabs out of the clouds overhead. The sound of thunder rolls through the congested sky west to east, like the wheels of some great stone bucka rolling down an alley in the sky. The pines and oaks and birches are still and all the world holds its breath. All shadows have disappeared. The birds have fallen silent. Overhead another of those great waggons rolls its solemn course, and in its wake—hark!—we hear an engine. Soon enough John Cullum’s dusty Ford Galaxie appears with Eddie Dean’s anxious face rising behind the wheel and the headlights shining in the premature gathering dark.
Two
Eddie opened his mouth to ask Roland how far they were going, but of course he knew. Turtleback Lane’s south end was marked by a sign bearing a large black 1, and each of the driveways splitting off lakeward to their left bore another, higher number. They caught glimpses of the water through the trees, but the houses themselves were below them on the slope and tucked out of sight. Eddie seemed to taste ozone and electric grease with every breath he drew, and twice patted the hair on the nape of his neck, sure it would be standing on end. It wasn’t, but knowing it didn’t change the nervous, witchy feeling of exhilaration that kept sweeping through him, lighting up his solar plexus like an overloaded circuit-breaker and spreading out from there. It was the storm, of course; he just happened to be one of those people who feel them coming along the ends of their nerves. But never one’s approach as strongly as this.
It’s not all the storm, and you know it.
No, of course not. Although he thought all those wild volts might somehow have facilitated his contact with Susannah. It came and went like the reception you sometimes got from distant radio stations at night, but since their meeting with
(Ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost)
Chevin of Chayven, it had become much stronger. Because this whole part of Maine was thin, he suspected, and close to many worlds. Just as their ka-tet was close to whole again. For Jake was with Susannah, and the two of them seemed to be safe enough for the time being, with a solid door between them and their pursuers. Yet there was something ahead of those two, as well—something Susannah either didn’t want to talk about or couldn’t make clear. Even so, Eddie had sensed both her horror of it and her terror that it might come back, and he thought he knew what it was: Mia’s baby. Which had been Susannah’s as well in some way he still didn’t fully understand. Why an armed woman should be afraid of an infant, Eddie didn’t know, but he was sure that if she was, there must be a good reason for it.
They passed a sign that said FENN, 11, and another that said ISRAEL, 12. Then they came around a curve and Eddie stamped on the Galaxie’s brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the side of the road beside a sign reading BECKHARDT, 13, was a familiar Ford pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the truck’s rust-spotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue chambray shirt buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, wattled neck. He also wore a Boston Red Sox cap tilted just a little to one side as if to say I got the drop on you, partner. He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and good-humored face on the breathless pre-storm air.
All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up nerves, aware that he was smiling as you do when you come across an old friend in a strange place—the Pyramids of Egypt, the marketplace in old Tangiers, maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane in Lovell on a thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also smiling. Old long, tall, and ugly—smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed.
They got out of the car and approached John Cullum. Roland raised a fist to his forehead and bent his knee a little. “Hile, John! I see you very well.”
“Ayuh, see you, too,” John Cullum said. “Clear as day.” He skimmed a salute outward from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he dipped his chin in Eddie’s direction. “Young fella.”
“Long days and pleasant nights,” Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.
“That’s a pretty thing to say,” John remarked. Then: “I beat you here. Kinda thought I might.”
Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it. “I don’t think this is quite the place…?” In his voice was the barest touch of a question.
“Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up,” John agreed, puffing his pipe. “I passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it.” For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in a jar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a door?” The idea occurred to him… and then seized him. “It is a door, isn’t it? And it’s open!”
John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider. “Might be a door,” he said, stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day: doe-ahh. “Doesn’t exactly look like a door, but… ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in that light?” He appeared to calculate. “Ayuh. But I think you boys want to palaver, and if we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won’t be no palaver; just you standin there with your jaws dropped.” Cullum threw back his head and laughed. “Me, too!”
“What’s Cara Laughs?” Eddie asked.
John shrugged. “A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale. They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she…” He made a bottle-tipping motion.
Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn’t understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.
He looked up and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West toward the White Mountains, too—what was almost surely called the Discordia in a world not far from here—and along the Path of the Beam.