The Dark Tower-Part 1#-2#(58)

As I quickly found out.

"I know the answers to the questions they keep asking you," he said.

"What I don't know is why you haven't given me up."

"I said the idea had never crossed my mind-that tattle-taking wasn't the way I'd been raised to do things. And besides, it wasn't as if they were putting an electrified cattle-prod up my rectum or pulling my fingernails …  although they might have resorted to such techniques, had it been anyone other than me. The worst they 'd done was to make me look at the plate of cookies on Prentiss's desk for an hour and a half before relenting and letting me have one.

"I was angry at you at first," Trampas said, "but then I realized-reluctantly-that I might have done the same thing in your place. The first week you were back I didn't sleep much, I can tell you. I'd lie on my bed there in Damli, expecting them to come for me at any minute. You know what they'd do if they found out it was me, don't you?"

"I told him I did not. He said that he'd be flogged by Gaskie,

Finli's Second, and then sent raw-backed into the wastes, either to die in theDiscordia or to find service in the castle of the Red King. But such a trip would not be easy. Southeast ofFedic one may also contract such things as the Eating Sickness (probably cancer, but a kind that's very fast, very painful, and very nasty) or what they just call the Crazy. The Children of Roderick commonly suffer from both these problems, and others, as well. The minor skin diseases of Thunderclap-the eczema, pimples, and rashes-are apparently only the beginning of one's problems in End-World. But for an exile, service in the Court of the Crimson King would be the only hope. Certainly a can-toi such as Trampas couldn't go to the Callas. They're closer, granted, and there's genuine sunshine there, but you can imagine what would happen to low men or the taheen in the Arc of the Callas."

Roland's tet can imagine that very well.

"Don't make too much of it," I said. "As that new fellow Dinky might say, I don't put my business on the street. It s really as simple as that. There's no chivalry involved."

"He said he was grateful nevertheless, then looked around and said, very low: 'I'd pay you back for your kindness, Ted, by telling you to cooperate with them, to the extent that you can. I don't mean you should get me in trouble, but I don't want you to get in more trouble yourself, either. They may not need you quite as badly as you may think."

"And I'd have you hear me well now, lady and gentlemen, for this may be very important; I simply don't know. All I know for certain is that what Trampas told me next gave me a terrible deep chill. He said that of all the other-side worlds, there's one that's unique. They call it the Real World. All Trampas seems to know about it is that it's real in the same way Mid-World was, before the Beams began to weaken and Mid-World moved on. In America-side of this special 'real' World, he says, time sometimes jerks but always runs one way: ahead. And in that world lives a man who also serves as a kind of facilitator; he may even be a mortal guardian of Gan's Beam."

TWELVE

Roland looked at Eddie, and as their eyes met, both mouthed the same word: King.

THIRTEEN

"Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has ever protected his life. They say his song has cast the circle," Trampas told me, "although no one seems to know exactly what that means." Now, however, ka-not the Red King but plain old ka-has decreed that this man, this guardian or whatever he is, should die.

He's stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was supposed to sing, he's stopped, and that has finally made him vulnerable. But not to the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it's ka he's vulnerable to. "He no longer sings," Trampas said. "His song, the one that matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose."

FOURTEEN

In the outer silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it.

FIFTEEN

"Trampas told me all this only so I'd understand I was no longer completely indispensable. Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor in bringing down Shardik 's Beam before this man's death could cause Gan 's Beam to break."

A pause.

"Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet … "

SIXTEEN

Roland, exasperated, twirled his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were listening could see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi guard knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some rambling, discursive sidetrack. It was understandable-the man was clearly exhausted-but there was something here more important than everything else. Eddie knew it, too. Roland could read it on the young man's strained face.

Together they watched the remaining brown tape-now no more than an eighth of an inch deep-melt away.

SEVENTEEN

" …  yet we're only poor benighted humies, and I suppose we can't know about these things, not with any degree of certainty … "

He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at last:

"Iasked this magic man's name and Trampas said, 'Iknow it not,

Ted, but I do know there's no magic in him anymore, for he's ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do. If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of Ninety-nine, which is that of our world, will combine to-"

But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.

EIGHTEEN

The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that low fwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressed STOP. He muttered "Fuck!" under his breath.

"Just when it was getting interesting," Jake said. "And those numbers again. Nineteen …  and ninety-nine." He paused, then said them together. "Nineteen-ninety-nine." Then a third time. "1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to have her baby. Where Black Thirteen is now."

"Keystone World, Keystone Year," Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle, held it up to one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. "Where time always goes in one direction. Like it's s'posed to."

"Gan created time," Roland said. "This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the void-some tales say from the sea, but both surely mean the Prim-and made the world. Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling and that was time."

Something was gathering in the cave. Some revelation.

They all felt it, a thing as close to bursting as Mia's belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been haunted by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the sky, saw them written on board fences, heard them in their dreams.

Oy looked up, ears cocked, eyes bright.

Susannah said, "When Mia left the room we were in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie Pig-room 1919, it was-I fell into a kind of trance. I had dreams …  jailhouse-dreams …  newscasters announcing that this one, that one, and t'other one had died-"

"You told us," Eddie said.

She shook her head violently. "Not all of it, I didn't. Because some of it didn't seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy's little boy was dead, for instance-little John-John, the one who saluted his Daddy's coffin when the catafalque went by. I didn't tell you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had litde John-John Kennedy died in your whens? Either of your whens?"

They shook their heads. Jake was not even sure of whom Susannah was speaking.

"But he did. In the Keystone World, and in a when beyond any of ours. I bet it was in the when of '99. So dies the son of the last gunslinger, O Discordia. What I think now is that I was kind of hearing the obituary page from The Time Traveler's Weekly. It was all different times mixed together. John John Kennedy, then Stephen King. I'd never heard of him, but David Brinkley said he wrote 'salem's Lot. That's the book Father Callahan was in, right?"

Roland and Eddie nodded.

"Father Callahan told us his story."

"Yeah," Jake said. "But what-"

She overrode him. Her eyes were hazy, distant. Eyes just a look away from understanding. "And then comes Brautigan to the Ka-Tet of Nineteen, and tells his tale. And look! Look at the tape counter!"

They leaned over. In the windows were 1999

"I think King might have written Ted's story, too," she said.

"Anybody want to take a guess what year that story showed up, or wz'Z/show up, in the Keystone World?"

"1999," Jake said, low. "But not the part we heard. The part we didn't hear. Ted's Connecticut Adventure."

"And you met him," Susannah said, looking at her dinh and her husband. 'You met Stephen King."

They nodded again.

"He made the Pere, he made Brautigan, he made us," she said, as if to herself, then shook her head. "No." All things serve the Beam. "He …  he facilitated us."

"Yeah." Eddie was nodding. "Yeah, okay. That feels just about right."

"In my dream I was in a cell," she said. "I was wearing the clothes I had on when I got arrested. And David Brinkley said Stephen King was dead, woe, Discordia-something like that.