Song of Susannah

Just don’t strike me dead, Eddie thought, and turned west. I need to get back to my sweetheart, so please don’t strike me dead, whoever or whatever you are.

“Man, I’m so scared,” he said.

Roland reached out and briefly grasped his hand.

TWO

Three miles from the shopping center, they came to a dirt road which struck off into the pine trees on their left. There had been other byways, which Eddie had passed without slowing from the steady thirty miles an hour he had been maintaining, but at this one he stopped.

Both front windows were down. They could hear the wind in the trees, the grouchy call of a crow, the not-too-distant buzz of a powerboat, and the rumble of the Ford’s engine. Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds. The sign marking the turnoff said no more than private drive. Nevertheless, Eddie was nodding.

“This is it.”

“Yes, I know. How’s your leg?”

“Hurts. Don’t worry about it. Are we gonna do this?”

“We have to,” Roland said. ’You were right to bring us here. What’s here is the other half of this.” He tapped the paper in his pocket, the one conveying ownership of the vacant lot to the Tet Corporation.

“You think this guy King is the rose’s twin.”

“You say true.” Roland smiled at his own choice of words. Eddie thought he’d rarely seen one so sad. “We’ve picked up the Calla way of talking, haven’t we? Jake first, then all of us. But that will fall away.”

“Further to go,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.

“Aye, and it will be dangerous. Still… maybe nothing so dangerous as this. Shall we roll?”

“In a minute. Roland, do you remember Susannah mentioning a man named Moses Carver?”

“A stem… which is to say a man of affairs. He took over her father’s business when sai Holmes died, am I correct?”

“Yeah. He was also Suze’s godfather. She said he could be trusted completely. Remember how mad she got at Jake and me when we suggested he might have stolen the company’s money?”

Roland nodded.

“I trust her judgment,” Eddie said. “What about you?”

“Yes.”

“If Carver is honest, we might be able to put him in charge of the things we need to accomplish in this world.”

None of this seemed terribly important compared to the force Eddie felt rising all around him, but he thought it was. They might only have one chance to protect the rose now and ensure its survival later. They had to do it right, and Eddie knew that meant heeding the will of destiny.

In a word, ka.

“Suze says Holmes Dental was worth eight or ten million when you snatched her out of New York, Roland. If Carver’s as good as I hope he is, the company might be worth twelve or fourteen million by now.”

“That’s a lot?”

“Delah,” Eddie said, tossing his open hand at the horizon, and Roland nodded. “It sounds funny to talk about using the profits from some kind of dental process to save the viniverse, but that’s just what I am talking about. And the money the tooth-fairy left her may only be the beginning. Microsoft, for instance. Remember me mentioning that name to Tower?”

Roland nodded. “Slow down, Eddie. Calm down, I beg.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and pulled in a deep breath.

“It’s this place. The singing. The faces… do you see the faces in the trees? In the shadows?”

“I see them very well.”

“It makes me feel a little crazy. Bear with me. What I’m talking about is merging Holmes Dental and the Tet Corporation, then using our knowledge of the future to turn it into one of the richest combinations in the history of the world. Resources to equal those of the Sombra Corporation… or maybe North Central Positronics itself.”

Roland shrugged, then lifted a hand as if to ask how Eddie could talk about money while in the presence of the immense force flowing along the barrel of the Beam and through them, lifting the hair from the napes of their necks, making their sinuses tingle, turning every woodsy shadow into a watching face… as if a multitude had gathered here to watch them play out a crucial scene in their drama.

“I know how you feel, but it matters,” Eddie insisted. “Believe me, it does. Suppose, for instance, we were to grow fast enough to buy out North Central Positronics before it can rise as a force in this world? Roland, we might be able to turn it, the way you can turn even the biggest river with no more than a single spade up in its headwaters, where it’s only a trickle.”

At this Roland’s eyes gleamed. “Take it over,” he said. “Turn its purpose from the Crimson King’s to our own. Yes, that might be possible.”

“Whether it is or isn’t, we have to remember that we’re not just playing for 1977, or 1987, where I came from, or 1999, where Suze went.” In that world, Eddie realized, Calvin Tower might be dead and Aaron Deepneau would be for sure, their final action in the Dark Tower’s drama-saving Donald Callahan from the Hitler Brothers-long finished. Swept from the stage, both of them. Into the clearing at the end of the path along with Gasher and Hoots, Benny Slight-man, Susan Delgado

(Calla, Callahan, Susan, Susannah)

and the Tick-Tock Man, even Blaine and Patricia. Roland and his ka-tet would also pass into that clearing, be it early or late. In the end-if they were fantastically lucky and suicidally brave-only the Dark Tower would stand. If they could nip North Central Positronics in the bud, they might be able to save all the Beams that had been broken. Even if they failed at that, two Beams might be enough to hold the Tower in place: the rose in New York and a man named Stephen King in Maine. Eddie’s head had no proof that this was indeed the case… but his heart believed it.

“What we’re playing for, Roland, is the ages.”

Roland made a fist and thumped it lightly on the dusty dashboard of John Cullum’s old Ford and nodded.

“Anything can go on that lot, you realize that? Anything. A building, a park, a monument, The National Gramophone Institute. As long as the rose stays. This guy Carver can make the Tet Corporation legal, maybe working with Aaron Deepneau-”

“Yes,” Roland said. “I liked Deepneau. He had a true face.”

Eddie thought so, too. “Anyway, they can draw up legal papers that take care of the rose-the rose always stays, no matter what. And I’ve got a feeling that it will. 2007, 2057, 2525, 3700… hell, the year 19,000… I think it’ll always be there. Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal. We have to do it right while we have the chance, though. Because this is the key world. In this one you never get a chance to whittle a little more if the key doesn’t turn. In this world I don’t think there are any do-overs.”

Roland considered this, then pointed to the dirt road leading into the trees. Into a forest of watching faces and singing voices. A harmonium of all that filled life with worth and meaning, that held to the truth, that acknowledged the White. “And what about the man who lives at the end of this road, Eddie? If he is a man.”

“I think he is, and not just because of what John Cullum said. It’s what I feel here.” Eddie patted his chest above the heart.

“So do I.”

“Do you say so, Roland?”

“Aye, I do. Is he immortal, do you think? Because I’ve seen much in my years, and heard rumors of much more, but never of a man or woman who lived forever.”

“I don’t think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.”

Understanding lit up Roland’s eyes. At last, Eddie thought. At last he sees it.

But how long had it taken him to see it himself, and then to swallow it? God knew he should have been able to, after all the other wonders he’d seen, and yet still this last step had eluded him. Even discovering that Pere Callahan had seemingly sprung alive and breathing from a fiction called ’salem’s Lot hadn’t been enough to take him that last crucial step. What had finally done it was finding out that Co-Op City was in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. In this world, at least. Which was the only world that mattered.

“Maybe he’s not at home,” Roland said as around them the whole world waited. “Maybe this man who made us is not at home.”

“You know he is.”

Roland nodded. And the old light had dawned in his eyes, light from a fire that had never gone out, the one that had lit his way along the Beam all the way from Gilead.

“Then drive on!” he cried hoarsely. “Drive on, for your father’s sake! If he’s God-our God-I’d look Him in the eye and ask Him the way to the Tower!”

“Would you not ask him the way to Susannah, first?”

As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Eddie regretted it and prayed the gunslinger would not answer it.

Roland didn’t. He only twirled the remaining fingers on his right hand: Go, go.

Eddie put the gearshift of Cullum’s Ford into Drive and turned onto the dirt road. He drove them into a great singing force that seemed to go through them like a wind, turning them into something as insubstantial as a thought, or a dream in the head of some sleeping god.

THREE

A quarter of a mile in, the road forked. Eddie took the left-hand branch, although the sign pointing that way said row-den, not king. The dust raised by their passage hung in the rearview mirror. The singing was a sweet din, pouring through him like liquor. His hair was still standing up at the roots, and his muscles were trembling. Called upon to draw his gun, Eddie thought he would probably drop the damned thing. Even if he managed to hold onto it, aiming would be impossible. He didn’t know how the man they were looking for could live so close to the sound of that singing and eat or sleep, let alone write stories. But of course King wasn’t just close to the sound; if Eddie had it right, King was the source of the sound.