The Dark Tower

Dinky raised his eyebrows but gave Jake a smoke. The boy tamped it on his thumbnail, as he’d seen the gunslinger do with tailor-made smokes, then accepted a light and inhaled deeply. The smoke still burned, but not so harshly as the first time. His head only swam a little and he didn’t cough. Pretty soon I’ll be a natural, he thought. If I ever make it back to New York, maybe I can go to work for the Network, in my Dad’s department. I’m already getting good at The Kill.

He lifted the cigarette in front of his eyes, a little white missile with smoke issuing from the top instead of the bottom. The word CAMEL was written just below the filter. “I told myself I’d never do this,” Jake told Dinky. “Never in life. And here I am with one in my hand.” He laughed. It was a bitter laugh, an adult laugh, and the sound of it coming out of his mouth made him shiver.

“I used to work for this guy before I came here,” Dinky said. “Mr. Sharpton, his name was. He used to tell me that never’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.”

Jake made no reply. He was thinking of how Eddie had talked about the rooms of ruin. Jake had followed Mia into a room like that, once upon a time and in a dream. Now Mia was dead. Callahan was dead. And Eddie was dying. He thought of all the bodies lying out there under blankets while thunder rolled like bones in the distance. He thought of the man who’d shot Eddie snap-rolling to the left as Roland’s bullet finished him off. He tried to remember the welcoming party for them back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the music and dancing and colored torches, but all that came clear was the death of Benny Slightman, another friend. Tonight the world seemed made of death.

He himself had died and come back: back to Mid-World and back to Roland. All afternoon he had tried to believe the same thing might happen to Eddie and knew somehow that it would not. Jake’s part in the tale had not been finished. Eddie’s was. Jake would have given twenty years of his life—thirty!—not to believe that, but he did. He supposed he had progged it somehow.

The rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

Jake knew a spider. Was Mia’s child watching all of this? Having fun? Maybe rooting for one side or the other, like a fucking Yankee fan in the bleachers?

He is. I know he is. I feel him.

“Are you all right, kiddo?” Dinky asked.

“No,” Jake said. “Not all right.” And Dinky nodded as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer. Well, Jake thought, probably he expected it. He’s a telepath, after all.

As if to underline this, Dinky had asked who Mordred was.

“You don’t want to know,” Jake said. “Believe me.” He snuffed his cigarette half-smoked (“All your lung cancer’s right here, in the last quarter-inch,” his father used to say in tones of absolute certainty, pointing to one of his own filterless cigarettes like a TV pitchman) and left Corbett Hall. He used the back door, hoping to avoid the cluster of waiting, anxious Breakers, and in that he had succeeded. Now he was in Pleasantville, sitting on the curb like one of the homeless people you saw back in New York, waiting to be called. Waiting for the end.

He thought about going into the tavern, maybe to draw himself a beer (surely if he was old enough to smoke and to kill people from ambush he was old enough to drink a beer), maybe just to see if the jukebox would play without change. He bet that Algul Siento had been what his Dad had claimed America would become in time, a cashless society, and that old Seeberg was rigged so you only had to push the buttons in order to start the music. And he bet that if he looked at the song-strip next to 19, he’d see “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” by Elton John.

He got to his feet, and that was when the call came. Nor was he the only one who heard it; Oy let go a short, hurt-sounding yip. Roland might have been standing right next to them.

To me, Jake, and hurry. He’s going.

SEVEN

Jake hurried back down one of the alleys, skirted the still-smoldering Warden’s House (Tassa the houseboy, who had either ignored Roland’s order to leave or hadn’t been informed of it, was sitting silently on the stoop in a kilt and a sweatshirt, his head in his hands), and began to trot up the Mall, sparing a quick and troubled glance at the long line of dead bodies. The little séance-circle he’d seen earlier was gone.