Now, lying in his bed at Shapleigh House (known as Shit House to the Breakers), a full Mall’s length away from Damli House, Pimli remembered the feeling-the flat-out certainty-that everything was going to be okay; success assured, only a matter of time. On the balcony Finli had shared it, but Pimli wondered if his Security Chief was now lying awake as Pimli himself was, and thinking how easy it was to be misled when you were around working Breakers. Because, do ya, they sent up that happy-gas. That good-mind vibe.
And suppose… just suppose, now… someone was actually channeling that feeling? Sending it up to them like a lullabye?
Go to sleep, Pimli, go to sleep, Finli, go to sleep all of you good children…
Ridiculous idea, totally paranoid. Still, when another doubleboom of thunder rolled out of what might still be the southeast-from the direction of Fedic and the Discordia, anyway-
Pimli Prentiss sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.
Finli had spoken of doubling the guard tonight, both in the watchtowers and along the fences. Perhaps tomorrow they might triple it. Just to be on the safe side. And because complacency this close to the end would be a very bad thing, indeed.
Pimli got out of bed, a tall man with a hairy slab of gut, now wearing blue pajama pants and nothing else. He pissed, then knelt in front of the toilet’s lowered lid, folded his hands, and prayed until he felt sleepy. He prayed to do his duty. He prayed to see trouble before trouble saw him. He prayed for his Ma, just as Jim Jones had prayed for his as he watched the line move toward die tub of poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to little more than a senile mutter, dien went back to bed, calm again. His last thought before drifting off was about tripling the guard first thing in the morning, and that was the first thing he thought of when he woke to a room awash in artificial sunlight. Because you had to take care of the eggs when you were almost home.
Chapter VII:
KA-SHUME
ONE
A feeling both blue and strange crept among the gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged to him or her alone. Roland, who might have been expected to know the feeling for what it was (ka-shume, Cort would have called it), ascribed it instead to worries about the following day and even more to the debilitating atmosphere of Thunderclap, where day was dim and night was as dark as blindness.
Certainly there was enough to keep them busy after the departure of Brautigan, Earnshaw, and Sheemie Ruiz, that friend of Roland’s childhood. (Both Susannah and Eddie had attempted to talk to the gunslinger about Sheemie, and Roland had shaken them off. Jake, strong in the touch, hadn’t even tried. Roland wasn’t ready to talk about those old days again, at least not yet.)
There was a path leading down and around the flank of Steek-Tete, and they found the cave of which the old man had told them behind a cunning camouflage of rocks and desert-dusty bushes. This cave was much bigger than the one above, with gas lanterns hung from spikes that had been driven into the rock walls. Jake and Eddie lit two of these on each side, and the four of them examined the cave’s contents in silence.
The first thing Roland noticed was the sleeping-bags: a quartet lined up against the left-hand wall, each considerately placed on an inflated air mattress. The tags on the bags read PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. Beside the last of these, a fifth air mattress had been covered with a layer of bath towels. They were expecting four people and one animal, the gunslinger thought. Precognition, or have they been watching us somehow? And does it matter?
There was a plastic-swaddled object sitting on a barrel marked DANGER! MUNITIONS! Eddie removed the protective plastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of the reels was loaded. Roland could make nothing of the single word on the front of the speaking machine and asked Susannah what it was.
“Wollensak,” she said. “A German company. When it comes to these things, they make the best.”
“Not no mo’, sugarbee,” Eddie said. “In my when we like to say ’sony! No baloney!’ They make a tape-player you can clip right to your belt. It’s called a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighs twenty pounds. More, with the batteries.”
Susannah was examining the unmarked tape boxes that had been stacked beside the Wollensak. There were three of them. “I can’t wait to hear what’s on these,” she said.
“After the daylight goes, maybe,” Roland said. “For now, let’s see what else we’ve got here.”
“Roland?” Jake asked.
The gunslinger turned toward him. There was something about the boy’s face that almost always softened Roland’s own.
Looking at Jake did not make the gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give his features a quality they didn’t ordinarily have. Susannah thought it was the look of love. And, perhaps, some thin hope for the future.
“What is it, Jake?”
“I know we’re going to fight-”
“’Join us next week for Return to the O.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee Van Cleef,’” Eddie murmured, walking toward the back of the cave. There a much larger object had been covered with what looked like a quilted mover’s pad.
“-but when?” Jake continued. “Will it be tomorrow?”
“Perhaps,” Roland replied. “I think the day after’s more likely.”
“I have a terrible feeling,” Jake said. “It’s not being afraid, exactly-”
“Do you think they’re going to beat us, hon?” Susannah asked. She put a hand on Jake’s neck and looked into his face.
She had come to respect his feelings. She sometimes wondered how much of what he was now had to do with the creature he’d faced to get here: the thing in the house on Dutch Hill. No robot there, no rusty old clockwork toy. The doorkeeper had been a genuine leftover of the Prim. “You smell a whuppin in the wind? That it?”
“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve only felt something like it once, and that was just before…”
“Just before what?” Susannah asked, but before Jake had a chance to reply, Eddie broke in. Roland was glad. Just before I fell. That was how Jake had meant to finish. Just before Rolandlet me fall.
“Holy shit! Come here, you guys! You gotta see this!”
Eddie had pulled away the mover’s pad and revealed a motorized vehicle that looked like a cross between an ATV and a gigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep zigzag treads. The controls were all on the handlebars.
And there was a playing card propped on the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie plucked it up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman with a shawl over her head at a spinning wheel. It was the Eady of Shadows.
“Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride, sugarbee,” Eddie said.
Susannah had hurried over at her rapid crawl. Now she lifted her arms. “Boost me up! Boost me, Eddie!”
He did, and when she was in the saddle, holding handlebars instead of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susannah thumbed a red button and the engine thrummed to life, so low you could barely hear it. Electricity, not gasoline, Eddie was quite sure. Like a golf-cart, but probably a lot faster.
Susannah turned toward them, smiling radiantly. She patted the three-wheeler’s dark brown nacelle. “Call me Missus Centaur!
I been lookin for this my whole life and never even knew.”
None of them noticed the stricken expression on Roland’s face. He bent over to pick up the card Eddie had dropped so no one would.
Yes, it was her, all right-the Lady of the Shadows. Under her shawl she seemed to be smiling craftily and sobbing, both at the same time. On the last occasion he’d seen that card, it had been in the hand of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes that of Flagg.
You have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, he had said. Worlds turn about your head.
And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among them for what it almost certainly was: not worry or weariness but ka-shume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meant to sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.
Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows.
Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming batde to break the power of the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had temporarily tilted in their favor would balance.
It never once crossed Roland’s mind that the one to die might be him.
TWO
There were three brand names on what Eddie immediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (as in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the Takuro Spirit); the third was North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well: U.S. ARMY, as in PROPERTY OF.
Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did.
God knew there was plenty more to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat was filled with food supplies (mosdy freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn’t taste as good as Nigel’s chow but would at least nourish them), bottled water, canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but nothing alcoholic), and the promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry. Some of die crates were marked U.S. ARMY, but by no means all.
Now their most basic abilities came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those talents and intuitions that could have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakened them… cosseted them… and then filed their teeth to deadly points.
