The Dark Tower

Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there was nothing to see but three men looking out over the dark desert toward the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam…and they were looking, Roland knew. Even with their eyes shut.

The sunbeam winked out. For a space of perhaps a dozen seconds the Devar-Toi was as dark as the desert, and Thunderclap Station, and the slopes of Steek-Tete. Then that absurd golden glow came back on. Dinky uttered a harsh (but not dissatisfied) sigh and stepped back, disengaging from Ted. A moment later, Ted let go of Stanley and turned to Roland.

“You did that?” the gunslinger asked.

“The three of us together,” Ted said. “Mostly it’s Stanley. He’s an extremely powerful sender. One of the few things that terrify Prentiss and the low men and the taheen is when they lose their artificial sunlight. It happens more and more often, you know, and not always because we’re meddling with the machinery. The machinery is just…” He shrugged. “It’s running down.”

“Everything is,” Eddie said.

Ted turned to him, unsmiling. “But not fast enough, Mr. Dean. This fiddling with the remaining two Beams must stop, and very soon, or it will make no difference. Dinky, Stanley, and I will help you if we can, even if it means killing the rest of them.”

“Sure,” Dinky said with a hollow smile. “If the Rev. Jim Jones could do it, why not us?”

Ted gave him a disapproving glance, then looked back at Roland’s ka-tet. “Perhaps it won’t come to that. But if it does…” He stood up suddenly and seized Roland’s arm. “Are we cannibals?” he asked in a harsh, almost strident voice. “Have we been eating the children the Greencloaks bring from the Borderlands?”

Roland was silent.

Ted turned to Eddie. “I want to know.”

Eddie made no reply.

“Madam-sai?” Ted asked, looking at the woman who sat astride Eddie’s hip. “We’re prepared to help you. Will you not help me by telling me what I ask?”

“Would knowing change anything?” Susannah asked.

Ted looked at her for a moment longer, then turned to Jake. “You really could be my young friend’s twin,” he said. “Do you know that, son?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Jake said. “It’s the way things work over here, somehow. Everything…um…fits.”

“Will you tell me what I want to know? Bobby would.”

So you can eat yourself alive? Jake thought. Eat yourself instead of them?

He shook his head. “I’m not Bobby,” he said. “No matter how much I might look like him.”

Ted sighed and nodded. “You stick together, and why would that surprise me? You’re ka-tet, after all.”

“We gotta go,” Dink told Ted. “We’ve already been here too long. It isn’t just a question of getting back for room-check; me n Stanley’ve got to trig their fucking telemetery so when Prentiss and The Wease check it they’ll say ‘Teddy B was there all the time. So was Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz, no problem with those boys.’ ”

“Yes,” Ted agreed. “I suppose you’re right. Five more minutes?”

Dinky nodded reluctantly. The sound of a siren, made faint by distance, came on the wind, and the young man’s teeth showed in a smile of genuine amusement. “They get so upset when the sun goes in,” he said. “When they have to face up to what’s really around them, which is some fucked-up version of nuclear winter.”

Ted put his hands in his pockets for a moment, looking down at his feet, then up at Roland. “It’s time that this…this grotesque comedy came to an end. We three will be back tomorrow, if all goes well. Meanwhile, there’s a bigger cave about forty yards down the slope, and on the side away from Thunderclap Station and Algul Siento. There’s food and sleeping bags and a stove that runs on propane gas. There’s a map, very crude, of the Algul. I’ve also left you a tape recorder and a number of tapes. They probably don’t explain everything you’d like to know, but they’ll fill in many of the blank spots. For now, just realize that Blue Heaven isn’t as nice as it looks. The ivy towers are watchtowers. There are three runs of fence around the whole place. If you’re trying to get out from the inside, the first run you strike gives you a sting—”

“Like barbwire,” Dink said.

“The second one packs enough of a wallop to knock you out,” Ted went on. “And the third—”

“I think we get the picture,” Susannah said.

“What about the Children of Roderick?” Roland asked. “They have something to do with the Devar, for we met one on our way here who said so.”

Susannah looked at Eddie with her eyebrows raised. Eddie gave her a tell-you-later look in return. It was a simple and perfect bit of wordless communication, the sort people who love each other take for granted.