The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower 7)

Enough to fill my basket, he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren't quite nonsense but old numbers, she'd told him once when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Of course, it's all nineteen.

Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake's left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.

Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my basket.

But what basket? What does it mean?

FOUR

Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum's twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer and she was just getting wa'amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazily back and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with the car's motion like corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debris which collects in any old car that's been hard-used: the ashes and pens and paperclips and the world's oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat and pine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door.

Someone passing would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff-and people! people who might be dead!-floating around in the car like jetsam in a space capsule. But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lake were mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even though there was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke was almost gone.

Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him. Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways motion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek.

FIVE

Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as well. That was why she'd labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of them.

The boy and the Pere had entered the Dixie Pig, a tiling that was either very brave or very foolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on what they'd found there.

Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had come ready to fight. Callahan was holdingjake's gun. . . and another thing, as well: some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of the little gods. The boy had Susannah's 'Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved from only the gods knew where.

The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanity ended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she'd been wearing hung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood a good many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not his attention-like that of the boy and the Pere at this very moment-been focused on other matters.

Callahan's low men, for instance. They might well be taheen, creature

s neither of the Prim nor of the natural world but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two. They certainly weren't the sort of beings Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen as a result of the old ones' ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, they might be genuine taheen, sometimes known as the third people or the can-toi, and yes,

Roland should have known. How many of the taheen now served the being known as the Crimson King? Some? Many?

All?

SIX

If the third answer was the correct one, Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger's nature, and in this case his lack of imagination was surely a blessing.

He saw what he needed to see. Although the can-toi-Callahan's low folk-had surrounded Jake and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn't even seen the duo behind them, the ones who'd been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street),

the Pere had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with the key he'd found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort to grab it.

Yet there was another problem, one Roland's eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush, fixed upon at once. He saw the blasphemous parody of Eld's Last Fellowship on the wall and understood its significance completely in the seconds before it was ripped away. And the smell: not just flesh but human flesh. This too he would have understood earlier, had he had time to think about it. . . only life in Calla Bryn Sturgis had allowed him little time to think. In die Calla, as in a storybook, life had been one damned thing after another.

Yet it was clear enough now, wasn't it? The low folk might only be taheen; a child's ogres, if it did ya. Those behind the tapestry were what Callahan had called Type One vampires and what Roland himself knew as the Grandfathers, perhaps the most gruesome and powerful survivors of the Prims long-ago recession. And while such as the taheen might be content to stand as they were, gawking at the sigul Callahan held up, the Grandfathers wouldn't spare it a second glance.

Now clattering bugs came pouring out from under the table. They were of a sort Roland had seen before, and any doubts he might still have held about what was behind that tapestry departed at the sight of them. They were parasites, blood-drinkers, camp-followers: Grandfather-fleas. Probably not dangerous while there was a bumbler present, but of course when you spied the little doctors in such numbers, the Grandfathers were never far behind.

As Oy charged at the bugs, Roland of Gilead did the only thing he could think of: he swam down to Callahan.

Into Callahan.

SEVEN

Pere, I am here.

Aye, Roland. What-

No time. GET HIM OUT OF HERE. You must. Get him out while there's still time!

EIGHT

And Callahan tried. The boy, of course, didn't want to go.

Looking at him through the Pere's eyes, Roland thought with some bitterness: / should have schooled him better in betrayal. Yet all the gods know I did the best I could.

"Go while you can," Callahan told Jake, striving for calmness.

"Catch up to her ifyou can. This is the command of your dinh. This is also the will of the White. "

It should have moved him but it didn't, he still argued-gods, he was nearly as bad as Eddie!-and Roland could wait no longer.

Pere, let me.

Roland seized control without waiting for a reply. He could already feel the wave, the aven kal, beginning to recede. And the Grandfathers would come at any second.

"Go, Jake!" he cried, using the Pere's mouth and vocal cords like a loudspeaker. If he had thought about how one might do something like this, he would have been lost completely, but thinking about things had also never been his way, and he was grateful to see the boy's eyes flash wide. "You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command you!"

Then, as in the hospital ward with Susannah, he felt himself once more tossed upward like something without weight, blown out of Callahan's mind and body like a bit of cobweb or a fluff of dandelion thistle. For a moment he tried to flail his way back, like a swimmer trying to buck a strong currentjust long enough to reach the shore, but it was impossible.

Roland/That was Eddie's voice, and filled with dismay. Jesus, Roland, what in God's name are those things?

The tapestry had been torn aside. The creatures which rushed out were ancient and freakish, their warlock faces warped with teeth growing wild, their mouths propped open by fangs as thick as the gunslinger's wrists, their wrinkled and stubbled chins slick with blood and scraps of meat.

And still-gods, oh gods-the boy remained!

"They'll kill Oy first!" Callahan shouted, only Roland didn't think it was Callahan. He thought it was Eddie, using Callahan's voice as Roland had. Somehow Eddie had found either smoother currents or more strength. Enough to get inside after Roland had been blown out. "They 'II kill him in front of you and drink his blood!"

It was finally enough. The boy turned and fled with Oy running beside him. He cut directly in front of the waseautaheen and between two of the low folken, but none made any effort to grab him. They were still staring at the raised Turtle on Callahan's palm, mesmerized.

The Grandfathers paid no attention to the fleeing boy at all, as Roland had felt sure they would not. He knew from Pere Callahan's story that one of the Grandfathers had come to the little town of "Salem's Lot" where the Pere had for awhile preached. The Pere had lived through the experience-not common for those who faced such monsters after losing their weapons and siguls of power-but the thing had forced Callahan to drink of its tainted blood before letting him go. It had marked him for these others.

Callahan was holding his cross-sigul out toward them, but before Roland could see anything else, he was exhaled back into darkness. The chimes began again, all but driving him mad with their awful tintinnabulation. Somewhere, faintly, he could hear Eddie shouting. Roland reached for him in the dark, brushed Eddie's arm, lost it, found his hand, and seized it. They rolled over and over, clutching each other, trying not to be separated, hoping not to be lost in the doorless dark between the worlds.