The Dark Tower

Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. “We saw what the Beam wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go.”

“Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in . . . I don’t know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends o’ the Rainbow?”

Roland was smiling. “Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales.”

“Logicka-what?”

Roland didn’t answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get his breath back—both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the potential of sai King . . . of what sai King might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn’t King also being carried on aven kal, perhaps generating the very wave that lifted him?

A man can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man could pull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator? And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something from nothing—seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?

And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long philosophical thoughts while two members of his tet were lost?

“Get this carriage going,” Roland said, trying to ignore the sweet humming he could hear—whether the Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know. “We’ve got to get to Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way through to where Susannah is.”

And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.

Eddie reached for the transmission lever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie had never quit running—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at Roland with a bleak eye.

“What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is, spill it quick. The baby’s coming now—may have come already. Soon they’ll have no more use for her!”

“I know,” Eddie said. “But we can’t go to Lovell.” He grimaced as if what he was saying was causing him physical pain. Roland guessed it probably was. “Not yet.”

TWO

They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweetly tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices. They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a million faces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you say lost.

Eddie half-expected Roland to shout at him—it wouldn’t be the first time—or maybe clout him upside the head, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when his pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to the jaw might clear his head, by Shardik.

Only muddy thinking’s not the trouble and you know it, he thought. Your head is clearer than his. If it wasn’t, you could let go of this world and go on hunting for your lost wife.

At last Roland spoke. “What is it, then? This?” He bent and picked up the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau’s pinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked it into Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.

“You know how much I love her,” Eddie said in a low, strained voice. “You know that.”

Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared to be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.

“I’d go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, this second! But we have to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave today, July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We—”

“Eddie, we’ve been through all of this.” Still not looking at him.