The Dark Tower

“Hile, you bondsmen of the King,” the older one said. He spoke in a purely conversational tone. Flaherty—his hands still bleeding from his extravagant drumming on the door through which the snot-babby had disappeared—could not seem to get the sense of him. It was the one of whom they had been warned, surely it was Roland of Gilead, but how had he gotten here, and on their blindside? How?

Roland’s cold blue eyes surveyed them. “Which of this sorry herd calls himself dinh? Will that one honor us by stepping forward or not? Not?” His eyes surveyed them; his left hand departed the vicinity of his gun and journeyed to the corner of his mouth, where a small sarcastic smile had bloomed. “Not? Too bad. Th’art cowards after all, I’m sorry to see. Thee’d kill a priest and chase a lad but not stand and claim thy day’s work. Th’art cowards and the sons of cow—”

Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around the butt of the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker’s clutch. “That would be me, Roland-of-Steven.”

“You know my name, do you?”

“Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. T’is the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee until he spewed ’is—”

Flaherty drew as he spoke, a bushwhacker’s trick he’d no doubt practiced and used before to advantage. And although he was fast and the forefinger of Roland’s left hand still touched the side of his mouth when Flaherty’s draw began, the gunslinger beat him easily. His first bullet passed between the lips of Jake’s chief harrier, exploding the teeth at the front of his upper jaw to bone fragments which Flaherty drew down his throat with his dying breath. His second pierced Flaherty’s forehead between the eyebrows and he was flung back against the New York/Fedic door with the unfired Glock spilling from his hand to discharge a final time on the hallway floor.

Most of the others drew a split-second later. Eddie killed the six in front, having taken time to reload the chamber he’d fired at Albrecht. When the revolver was empty, he rolled behind his dinh to reload, as he had been taught. Roland picked off the next five, then rolled smoothly behind Eddie, who took out the rest save one.

Lamla had been too cunning to try and so was the last standing. He raised his empty hands, the fingers furry and the palms smooth. “Will ye grant me parole, gunslinger, if I promise ye peace?”

“Not a bit,” Roland said, and cocked his revolver.

“Be damned to you, then, chary-ka,” said the taheen, and Roland of Gilead shot him where he stood, and Lamla of Galee fell down dead.

TWO

Flaherty’s posse lay stacked in front of the door like cordwood, Lamla facedown in front. Not a single one had had a chance to fire. The tile-throated corridor stank of the gunsmoke which hung in a blue layer. Then the purifiers kicked in, chugging wearily in the wall, and the gunslingers felt the air first stirred into motion and then sucked across their faces.

Eddie reloaded the gun—his, now, so he had been told—and dropped it back into its holster. Then he went to the dead and yanked four of them absently aside so he could get to the door. “Susannah! Suze, are you there?”

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts’ deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

So Eddie didn’t expect her to answer until she did—from another world, and through a single thickness of wood. “Eddie? Sugar, is it you?”

Eddie’s head, which had seemed perfectly normal only seconds before, was suddenly too heavy to hold up. He leaned it against the door. His eyes were similarly too heavy to hold open and so he closed them. The weight must have been tears, for suddenly he was swimming in them. He could feel them rolling down his cheeks, warm as blood. And Roland’s hand, touching his back.

“Susannah,” Eddie said. His eyes were still closed. His fingers were splayed on the door. “Can you open it?”

Jake answered. “No, but you can.”

“What word?” Roland asked. He had been alternating glances at the door with looks behind him, almost hoping for reinforcements (for his blood was up), but the tiled corridor was empty. “What word, Jake?”

There was a pause—brief, but it seemed very long to Eddie—and then both spoke together. “Chassit,” they said.