The Dark Tower

And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?

“I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,” Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”

The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him . . . although I can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain. There’s a person who wants . . .” For a moment she looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “. . . a person who wants to palaver with you,” she finished.

“All right,” he said.

She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”

Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”

“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.” And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor—not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.

At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faintly familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ there, and easily. When he had finished, it changed back again.

“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”

She smiled—her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff—and nodded. “Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”

“Say true?”

“True.”

The lobby had regained its normal rhythm . . . except, Roland understood, the rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned the nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to. They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it . . . which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called elevaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfectly straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old. And it didn’t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.

“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”

“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”

SEVEN

The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone. He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States. It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”