The Dark Tower

After a brief wait, the Directory Assistance operator coughed up Cullum’s number. Eddie tried to memorize it—he’d always been good at remembering numbers, Henry had sometimes called him Little Einstein—but this time he couldn’t be confident of his ability. Something seemed to have happened either to his thinking processes in general (which he didn’t believe) or to his ability to remember certain artifacts of this world (which he sort of did). As he asked for the number a second time—and wrote it in the gathered dust on the phone kiosk’s little ledge—Eddie found himself wondering if he’d still be able to read a novel, or follow the plot of a movie from the succession of images on a screen. He rather doubted it. And what did it matter? The Magic Lantern next door was showing Star Wars, and Eddie thought that if he made it to the end of his life’s path and into the clearing without another look at Luke Skywalker and another listen to Darth Vader’s noisy breathing, he’d still be pretty much okay.

“Thanks, ma’am,” he told the operator, and was about to dial again when there was a series of explosions behind him. Eddie whirled, heart-rate spiking, right hand dipping, expecting to see Wolves, or harriers, or maybe that son of a bitch Flagg—

What he saw was a convertible filled with laughing, goofy-faced high school boys with sunburned cheeks. One of them had just tossed out a string of firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July—what kids their age in Calla Bryn Sturgis would have called bangers.

If I’d had a gun on my hip, I might have shot a couple of those bucks, Eddie thought. You want to talk goofy, start with that. Yes. Well. And maybe he might not have. Either way, he had to admit the possibility that he was no longer exactly safe in the more civilized quarters.

“Live with it,” Eddie murmured, then added the great sage and eminent junkie’s favorite advice for life’s little problems: “Deal.”

He dialed John Cullum’s number on the old-fashioned rotary phone, and when a robot voice—Blaine the Mono’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, mayhap—asked him to deposit ninety cents, Eddie dropped in a buck. What the hell, he was saving the world.

The phone rang once . . . rang twice . . . and was picked up!

“John!” Eddie almost yelled. “Good fucking deal! John, this is—”

But the voice on the other end was already speaking. As a child of the late eighties, Eddie knew this did not bode well.

“—have reached John Cullum of Cullum Caretakin and Camp Checkin,” said Cullum’s voice in its familiar slow Yankee drawl. “I gut called away kinda sudden, don’tcha know, and can’t say with any degree a’ certainty just when I’ll be back. If this inconveniences ya, I beg pa’aad’n, but you c’n call Gary Crowell, at 926-5555, or Junior Barker, at 929-4211.”

Eddie’s initial dismay had departed—depaa-aated, Cullum himself would have said—right around the time the man’s wavery recorded voice was telling Eddie that he, Cullum, couldn’t say with any degree of certainty when he’d be back. Because Cullum was right there, in his hobbity little cottage on the western shore of Keywadin Pond, either sitting on his overstuffed hobbity sofa or in one of the two similarly overstuffed hobbity chairs. Sitting there and monitoring messages on his no-doubt-clunky mid-seventies answering machine. And Eddie knew this because . . . well . . .

Because he just knew.

The primitive recording couldn’t completely hide the sly humor that had crept into Cullum’s voice by the end of the message. “Coss, if you’re still set on talkin to nobody but yours truly, you c’n leave me a message at the beep. Keep it short.” The final word came out shawt.

Eddie waited for the beep and then said, “It’s Eddie Dean, John. I know you’re there, and I think you’ve been waiting for my call. Don’t ask me why I think that, because I don’t really know, but—”

There was a loud click in Eddie’s ear, and then Cullum’s voice—his live voice—said, “Hello there, son, you takin good care of my car?”

For a moment Eddie was too bemused to reply, for Cullum’s Downeast accent had turned the question into something quite different: You takin good care of my ka?

“Boy?” Cullum asked, suddenly concerned. “You still on the wire?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “and so are you. I thought you were going to Vermont, John.”

“Well, I tell you what. This place ain’t seen a day this excitin prob’ly since South Stoneham Shoe burnt down in 1923. The cops’ve gut all the ruds out of town blocked off.”

Eddie was sure they were letting folks through the roadblocks if they could show proper identification, but he ignored that issue in favor of something else. “Want to tell me you couldn’t find your way out of that town without seeing a single cop, if it suited your fancy?”