The Dark Tower

I won’t cry, he promised himself grimly. If I’m old enough to smoke and think about drawing myself a beer, I’m old enough to control my stupid eyes. I won’t cry.

Knowing he almost certainly would.

EIGHT

Sheemie and Ted had joined Dinky outside the proctor’s suite. Dinky had given up his seat to Sheemie. Ted looked tired, but Sheemie looked like shit on a cracker to Jake: eyes bloodshot again, a crust of dried blood around his nose and one ear, cheeks leaden. He had taken off one of his slippers and was massaging his foot as though it pained him. Yet he was clearly happy. Maybe even exalted.

“Beam says all may yet be well, young Jake,” Sheemie said. “Beam says not too late. Beam says thankya.”

“That’s good,” Jake said, reaching for the doorknob. He barely heard what Sheemie was saying. He was concentrating

(won’t cry and make it harder for her)

on controlling his emotions once he was inside. Then Sheemie said something that brought him back in a hurry.

“Not too late in the Real World, either,” Sheemie said. “We know. We peeked. Saw the moving sign. Didn’t we, Ted?”

“Indeed we did.” Ted was holding a can of Nozz-A-La in his lap. Now he raised it and took a sip. “When you get in there, Jake, tell Roland that if it’s June 19th of ’99 you’re interested in, you’re still okay. But the margin’s commencing to get a little thin.”

“I’ll tell him,” Jake said.

“And remind him that time sometimes slips over there. Slips like an old transmission. That’s apt to continue for quite awhile, regardless of the Beam’s recovery. And once the 19th is gone . . .”

“It can never come again,” Jake said. “Not there. We know.” He opened the door and slipped into the darkness of the proctor’s suite.

NINE

A single circle of stringent yellow light, thrown by the lamp on the bedtable, lay upon Eddie Dean’s face. It cast the shadow of his nose on his left cheek and turned his closed eyes into dark sockets. Susannah was kneeling on the floor beside him, holding both of his hands in both of hers and looking down at him. Her shadow ran long upon the wall. Roland sat on the other side of the bed, in deep shadow. The dying man’s long, muttered monologue had ceased, and his respiration had lost all semblance of regularity. He would snatch a deep breath, hold it, then let it out in a lengthy, whistling whoosh. His chest would lie still so long that Susannah would look up into his face, her eyes shining with anxiety until the next long, tearing breath had begun.

Jake sat down on the bed next to Roland, looked at Eddie, looked at Susannah, then looked hesitantly into the gunslinger’s face. In the gloom he could see nothing there except weariness.

“Ted says to tell you it’s almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya. Also that time could slip a notch.”

Roland nodded. “Yet we’ll wait for this to be finished, I think. It won’t be much longer, and we owe him that.”

“How much longer?” Jake murmured.

“I don’t know. I thought he might be gone before you got here, even if you ran—”

“I did, once I got to the grassy part—”

“—but, as you see . . .”

“He fights hard,” Susannah said, and that this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. “My man fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say.”

TEN

And so he did. Five endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie’s eyes opened. “Sue . . .” He said, “Su . . . sie—”

She leaned close, still holding his hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration fiercely narrowed. And with an effort Jake wouldn’t have believed possible, Eddie freed one of his hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed no sign. The smile that bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps even sensuous.

“Eddie! Welcome back!”

“Don’t bullshit . . . a bullshitter,” he whispered. “I’m goin, sweetheart, not comin.”

“That’s just plain sil—”

“Hush,” he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. “I . . . will . . . wait for you,” he said, forcing each word out with immense effort.

Jake saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body’s last message to the living world, and that was when the boy’s heart finally understood what his head had known for hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and scoured. When Roland took his hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to Eddie, it could happen to anybody. It could happen to him.

“Yes, Eddie. I know you’ll wait,” she said.