The Dark Tower

Roland considered this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they’d found the woman in ka’s road. However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn’t he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to play in their story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but.

All of this crossed his consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.

“No,” he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Tell her. Now.”

TEN

The boy—Jake—had fallen back against the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into the kid’s face, but the kid didn’t see him. His eyes were closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he’d fainted.

“Son? . . . Jake?”

“I have him,” the boy said without opening his eyes. “Not Stephen King—I can’t touch him—but the other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?”

Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husband enough at work—holding long, muttered dialogues with himself—to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn’t Stephen King. Which left about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking.

Nevertheless, she did answer, because she knew what always slowed her down.

“Too bad he doesn’t need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

ELEVEN

Strawberries aren’t out in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine Anderson (of Maybrook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are walking along the side of Route 7 (which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg Road) with their plastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at least half a mile along the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a hundred years ago, and it is to Garrett’s great-grandson that Roland Deschain of Gilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, do ya not kennit.