The Dark Tower

Chevin of Chayven, it had become much stronger. Because this whole part of Maine was thin, he suspected, and close to many worlds. Just as their ka-tet was close to whole again. For Jake was with Susannah, and the two of them seemed to be safe enough for the time being, with a solid door between them and their pursuers. Yet there was something ahead of those two, as well—something Susannah either didn’t want to talk about or couldn’t make clear. Even so, Eddie had sensed both her horror of it and her terror that it might come back, and he thought he knew what it was: Mia’s baby. Which had been Susannah’s as well in some way he still didn’t fully understand. Why an armed woman should be afraid of an infant, Eddie didn’t know, but he was sure that if she was, there must be a good reason for it.

They passed a sign that said FENN, 11, and another that said ISRAEL, 12. Then they came around a curve and Eddie stamped on the Galaxie’s brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the side of the road beside a sign reading BECKHARDT, 13, was a familiar Ford pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the truck’s rust-spotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue chambray shirt buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, wattled neck. He also wore a Boston Red Sox cap tilted just a little to one side as if to say I got the drop on you, partner. He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and good-humored face on the breathless pre-storm air.

All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up nerves, aware that he was smiling as you do when you come across an old friend in a strange place—the Pyramids of Egypt, the marketplace in old Tangiers, maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane in Lovell on a thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also smiling. Old long, tall, and ugly—smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed.

They got out of the car and approached John Cullum. Roland raised a fist to his forehead and bent his knee a little. “Hile, John! I see you very well.”

“Ayuh, see you, too,” John Cullum said. “Clear as day.” He skimmed a salute outward from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he dipped his chin in Eddie’s direction. “Young fella.”

“Long days and pleasant nights,” Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.

“That’s a pretty thing to say,” John remarked. Then: “I beat you here. Kinda thought I might.”

Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it. “I don’t think this is quite the place . . . ?” In his voice was the barest touch of a question.

“Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up,” John agreed, puffing his pipe. “I passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it.” For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in a jar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.

“Why?” he asked. “What’s up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a door?” The idea occurred to him . . . and then seized him. “It is a door, isn’t it? And it’s open!”

John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider. “Might be a door,” he said, stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day: doe-ahh. “Doesn’t exactly look like a door, but . . . ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in that light?” He appeared to calculate. “Ayuh. But I think you boys want to palaver, and if we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won’t be no palaver; just you standin there with your jaws dropped.” Cullum threw back his head and laughed. “Me, too!”

“What’s Cara Laughs?” Eddie asked.

John shrugged. “A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale. They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she . . .” He made a bottle-tipping motion.

Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn’t understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.