The Dark Tower

Mrs. Tassenbaum left her car at Sir Speedy-Park on Sixty-third Street (the sign on the sidewalk showed a knight in armor behind the wheel of a Cadillac, his lance sticking jauntily out of the driver’s window), where she and David rented two stalls on a yearly basis. They kept an apartment nearby, and Irene asked Roland if he would like to go there and clean up . . . although the man actually didn’t look all that bad, she had to admit. She’d bought him a fresh pair of jeans and a white button-up shirt which he had rolled to the elbows; she had also bought a comb and a tube of hair-mousse so strong its molecular makeup was probably closer to Super-Glue than it was to Vitalis. With the unruly mop of gray-flecked hair combed straight back from his brow, she had revealed the spare good looks and angular features of an interesting crossbreed: a mixture of Quaker and Cherokee was what she imagined. The bag of Orizas was once more slung over his shoulder. His gun, the holster wrapped in its shell-belt, was in there, too. He had covered it from enquiring eyes with the Old Home Days tee-shirt.

Roland shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but I’d as soon do what needs doing and then go back to where I belong.” He surveyed the hurrying throngs on the sidewalks bleakly. “If I belong anywhere.”

“You could stay at the apartment for a couple of days and rest up,” she said. “I’d stay with you.” And fuck thy brains out, do it please ya, she thought, and could not help a smile. “I mean, I know you won’t, but you need to know the offer’s open.”

He nodded. “Thankee, but there’s a woman who needs me to get back to her as soon as I can.” It felt like a lie to him, and a grotesque one at that. Based on everything that had happened, part of him thought that Susannah Dean needed Roland of Gilead back in her life almost as much as nursery bah-bos needed rat poison added to their bedtime bottles. Irene Tassenbaum accepted it, however. And part of her was actually anxious to get back to her husband. She had called him last night (using a pay phone a mile from the motel, just to be safe), and it seemed that she had finally gotten David Seymour Tassenbaum’s attention again. Based on her encounter with Roland, David’s attention was definitely second prize, but it was better than nothing, by God. Roland Deschain would vanish from her life soon, leaving her to find her way back to northern New England on her own and explain what had happened as best she could. Part of her mourned the impending loss, but she’d had enough adventure in the last forty hours or so to last her for the rest of her life, hadn’t she? And things to think about, that too. For one thing, it seemed that the world was thinner than she had ever imagined. And reality wider.

“All right,” she said. “It’s Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street you want to go to first, correct?”

“Yes.” Susannah hadn’t had a chance to tell them much about her adventures after Mia had hijacked their shared body, but the gunslinger knew there was a tall building—what Eddie, Jake, and Susannah called a skyscraper—now standing on the site of the former vacant lot, and the Tet Corporation must surely be inside. “Will we need a tack-see?”

“Can you and your furry friend walk seventeen short blocks and two or three long ones? It’s your call, but I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs.”

Roland didn’t know how long a long block or how short a short one might be, but he was more than willing to find out now that the deep pain in his right hip had departed. Stephen King had that pain now, along with the one in his smashed ribs and the right side of his split head. Roland did not envy him those pains, but at least they were back with their rightful owner.

“Let’s go,” he said.

THREE

Fifteen minutes later he stood across from the large dark structure thrusting itself at the summer sky, trying to keep his jaw from coming unhinged and perhaps dropping all the way to his chest. It wasn’t the Dark Tower, not his Dark Tower, at least (although it wouldn’t have surprised him to know there were people working in yon sky-tower—some of them readers of Roland’s adventures—who called 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza exactly that), but he had no doubt that it was the Tower’s representative in this Keystone World, just as the rose represented a field filled with them; the field he had seen in so many dreams.