hardly blame her for that.
“Now hear me very well and think hard, Susannah. Does the word Dandelo mean anything to you?”
Oy looked up, eyes bright.
She thought about it. “It might have some faint ring,” she said, “but I can’t do better than that. Why?”
Roland told her what he believed: that as Eddie lay dying, he had been granted some sort of vision about a thing… or a place… or a person. Something named Dandelo. Eddie had passed this on to Jake, Jake had passed it to Oy, and Oy had passed it on to Roland.
Susannah was frowning doubtfully. “It’s maybe been handed around too much. There was this game we used to play when we were kids. Whisper, it was called. The first kid would think something up, a word or a phrase, and whisper it to the next kid. You could only hear it once, no repeats allowed. The next kid would pass on what he thought he’d heard, and the next, and the next. By the time it got to the last kid in line, it was something entirely different, and everyone would have a good laugh. But if this is wrong, I don’t think we’ll be laughing.”
“Well,” Roland said, “we’ll keep a lookout and hope that I got it right. Mayhap it means nothing at all.” But he didn’t really believe that.
“What are we going to do for clothes, if it gets colder than this?” she asked.
“We’ll make what we need. I know how. It’s something else we don’t need to worry about today. What we do need to worry about is finding something to eat. I suppose if we have to, we can find Nigel’s pantry-”
“I don’t want to go back under the Dogan until we have to,”
Susannah said. “There’s got to be a kitchen near the infirmary; they must have fed those poor kids something.”
Roland considered this, then nodded. It was a good idea.
“Let’s do it now,” she said. “I don’t even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark.”
FOUR
On Turtleback Lane, in the year of ’02, month of August,
Stephen King awakes from a waking dream of Fedic. He types
“I don’t even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark. “The words appear on the screen before him. It’s the end of what he calls a subchapter, but that doesn’t always mean he’s done for the day. Being done for the day depends on what he hears. Or, more properly, on what he doesn’t. What he listens for is Ves’-Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle. This time the music, which is faint on some days and so loud on others that it almost deafens him, seems to have ceased. It will return tomorrow. At least, it always has.
He pushes the control-key and the S-key together. The computer gives a little chime, indicating that the material he’s written today has been saved. Then he gets up, wincing at the pain in his hip, and walks to the window of his office. It looks out on the driveway slanting up at a steep angle to the road where he now rarely walks. (And on the main road, Route 7,
never.) The hip is very bad this morning, and the big muscles of his thigh are on fire. He rubs the hip absently as he stands looking out.
Roland, you bastard, you gave me back the pain, he thinks. It runs down his right leg like a red-hot rope, can ya not say Gawd, can ya not say Gawd-bomb, and he’s the one who got stuck with it in the end. It’s been three years since the accident that almost took his life and the pain is still there. It’s less now, the human body has an amazing engine of healing inside it (a hot-enj, he thinks, and smiles), but sometimes it’s still bad. He doesn’t think about it much when he’s writing, writing’s a sort of benign todash, but it’s always stiff after he’s spent a couple of hours at his desk.
He thinks of Jake. He’s sorry as hell that Jake died, and he guesses that when this last book is published, the readers are going to be just wild. And why not? Some of them have known Take Chambers for twenty years, almost twice as long as the boy actually lived. Oh, they’ll be wild, all right, and when he writes back and says he’s as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He thinks of Misery-Annie Wilkes calling Paul Sheldon a cockadoodie brat for trying to get rid of silly, bubbleheaded Misery Chastain. Annie shouting that Paul was the writer and the writer is God to his characters, he doesn’t have to kill any of them if he doesn’t want to.
But he’s not God. At least not in this case. He knows damned well that Jake Chambers wasn’t there on the day of his accident, nor Roland Deschain, either-the idea’s laughable, they’re make-believe, for Christ’s sake-but he also knows that at some point the song he hears when he sits at his fancy Macintosh writing-machine became Jake’s death-song, and to ignore that would have been to lose touch with Ves’-Ka Gan entirely, and he must not do that. Not if he is to finish. That song is the only thread he has, the trail of breadcrumbs he must follow if he is ever to emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted, and-
Are you sure you planted it?
Well… no. In fact he is not. So call for the men in the white coats.
And are you completely sure Jake wasn’t there that day? After all, how much of the damned accident do you actually remember?
Not much. He remembers seeing the top of Bryan Smith’s van appear over the horizon, and realizing it’s not on the road, where it should be, but on the soft shoulder. After that he remembers Smith sitting on a rock wall, looking down at him, and telling him that his leg was broke in at least six places, maybe seven. But between these two memories-the one of the approach and the one of the immediate aftermath-the film of his memory has been burned red.
Or almost red.
But sometimes in the night, when he awakes from dreams he can’t quite remember…
Sometimes there are… well…
“Sometimes there are voices,” he says. “Why don’t you just say it?”
And then, laughing: “I guess Ijust did.”
He hears the approaching click of toenails down the hall, and Marlowe pokes his long nose into the office. He’s a Welsh Corgi, with short legs and big ears, and a pretty old guy now, with his own aches and pains, not to mention the eye he lost to cancer the previous year. The vet said he probably wouldn’t make it back from that one, but he did. What a good guy. What a tough guy. And when he raises his head from his necessarily low perspective to look at the writer, he’s wearing his old fiendish grin. How’s it goin, bubba? that look seems to say. Gettin any good words today? How do ya?
“I do fine,” he tells Marlowe. “Hangin in. How are you doin?”
Marlowe (sometimes known as The Snoutmaster) waggles his arthritic rear end in response.
“You again.” That’s what I said to him. And he asked, “Do you remember me?” Or maybe he said it-“You remember me.'I told him I was thirsty. He said he didn’t have anything to drink, he said sorry, and I called him a liar. And I was right to call him a liar because he wasn’t sorry a bit. He didn’t care a row of pins if I was thirsty because Jake was dead and he tried to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me-
“But none of that actually happened,” King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward the kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his increasingly long naps.
The house is empty except for the two of them, and under those circumstances he often talks to himself. “I mean, you know that, don’t you? That none of it actually happened?”
He supposes he does, but it was so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise diere, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is ever completely under the writer’s control, but this one is so out of control it’s ridiculous. It really is more like watching something happen-or listening to a song-than writing a damned made-up story.
He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and forget the whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see the new Clint Eastwood movie,
Bloodxoork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do anything.
Tomorrow he’ll be back at his desk, and something from the film may slip out into the book-certainly Roland himself was partly Clint Eastwood to start with, Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name.
And… speaking of books…
Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor just this morning: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It contains, of course, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the narrative poem that lies at the root of King’s long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his face that stops just short of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King has always suspected dogs are fairly recent emigres from that great I-know-just-how-you-feel country of Empathica), Marlowe’s own fiendish grin appears to widen.
“One place for the poem, old boy,” King says, and tosses the book back onto the coffee-table. It’s a big ’un, and lands with a thud. “One place and one place only.” Then he settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes. Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he’s fooling himself, knowing he’ll almost certainly doze off. As he does.
Part Four:
THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
Chapter I:
THE THING UNDER THE CASTLE
