The Dark Tower-Part 3#-4#-5#(4)

From the lawn came the blat of a hard-working small engine. Roland looked at Jake and was dismayed by the boy's pale cheeks and wide, frightened eyes.

"What? What's wrong?"

"He's not here, Roland. Not him, not any of his family. Just the man cutting the grass."

"Nonsense, you can't-" Mrs. Tassenbaum began.

"I know!" Jake shouted at her. "I know, lady!"

Roland was looking at Jake with a frank and horrified sort of fascination …  but in his current state, the boy either did not understand the look or missed it entirely.

Why are you lying, Jake? the gunslinger thought. And then, on the heels of that: He's not.

"What if it's already happened?" Jake demanded, and yes, he was worried about King, but Roland didn't think that was all he was worried about. "What if he's dead and his family's not here because the police called them, and-"

"It hasn't happened," Roland said, but that was all of which he was sure. What do you know, Jake, and why luon'tyou tell me?

There was no time to wonder about it now.

EIGHT

The man with the blue eyes sounded calm as he spoke to the boy, but he didn't look calm to Irene Tassenbaum; not at all. And those singing voices she'd first noticed outside the East Stoneham General Store had changed. Their song was still sweet, but wasn't there a note of desperation in it now, as well? She thought so. A high, pleading quality that made her temples throb.

"How can you know that?" the boy called Jake shouted at the man-his father, she assumed. "How can you be so fucking sure?"

Instead of answering the kid's question, the one called Roland looked at her. Mrs. Tassenbaum felt the skin of her arms and back break out in gooseflesh.

"Drive down, sai, may it do ya."

She looked doubtfully at the steep slope of the Cara Laughs driveway. "If I do, I might not get this bucket of bolts back up."

"You'll have to," Roland said.

NINE

The man cutting the grass was King's bondservant, Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He was white-haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing his years with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to the house, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn the mower off. He also removed his hat-without being exactly aware that he was doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at Roland's hip, and widened enough to make the crow's-feet around them disappear.

"Howdy, mister," he said cautiously. He thinks I'm a walk-in,

Roland thought. Just as she did.

And they were walk-ins of a sort, he and Jake; they just happened to have come to a time and place where such things were common.

And where time was racing.

Roland spoke before the man could go on. "Where are they? Where is he? Stephen King? Speak, man, and tell me the truth!"

The hat slipped from the old man's relaxing fingers and fell beside his feet on the newly cut grass. His hazel eyes stared into Roland's, fascinated: the bird looking at the snake.

"Fambly's across the lake, at that place they gut on t'other side," he said. "T'old Schindler place. Havin some kind of pa'ty, they are. Steve said he'd drive over after his walk." And he gestured to a small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just visible around the side of the house.

"Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell this lady!"

The old man looked briefly over Roland's shoulder, then back to the gunslinger. "Be easier was I t'drive ya there m'self."

Roland considered this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they'd found the woman in ka's road.

However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn't he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to play in their story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but.

All of this crossed his consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.

"No," he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder.

"Tell her. Now."

TEN

The boy-Jake-had fallen back against the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into the kid's face, but the kid didn't see him. His eyes were closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he'd fainted.

"Son? … Jake?"

"I have him," the boy said without opening his eyes. "Not Stephen King-I can't touch him-but the other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?"

Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husband enough at work-holding long, muttered dialogues with himself-to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn't Stephen King. Which left about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking.

Nevertheless, she did answer, because she knew what always slowed her down.

"Too bad he doesn't need to go to the bathroom," she said.

ELEVEN

Strawberries aren't out in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine Anderson (of May brook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are walking along the side of Route 7

(which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg Road) with their plastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at least half a mile along the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a hundred years ago, and it is to Garrett's great-grandson that RolandDeschain ofGilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, doya not kennit.

The two women have enjoyed their hour's walk, not because either of them has any great love of raspberries (Justine reckons she won't even eat hers; the seeds get caught in her teeth) but because it's given them a chance to catch up on their respective families and to laugh a little together about the years when their friendship was new and probably the most important thing in either girl's life. They met at Vassar College

(a thousand years ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together at graduation the year they were juniors. This is what they are talking about when the blue minivan-it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan,

Justine recognizes the make and model because her oldest son had one just like it when his tribe started growing-comes around the curve by Melder's German Restaurant and Brathaus. It's all over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming up dust from the southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar and spuming up more from the northbound one. The second time it does this-rolling toward them now, and coming at a pretty damned good clip-Justine thinks it may actually go into the ditch and turn over ("turn turtle," they used to say back in the forties, when she and Elvira had been at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back on the road just before that can happen.

"Look out, that person's drunk or something!" Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back, but they find their way blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The thorns catch at their slacks (thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts, Justine will think later …  when she has time to think) and pull out little puffs of cloth.

Justine is thinking she should put an arm around her friend's shoulder and tumble them both over the thigh-high wall-do a backflip, just like in gym class all those years ago-but before she can make up her mind to do it, the blue van is by them, and at the moment it passes, it's more or less on the road and not a danger to them.

Justine watches it go by in a muffled blare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her chest, the taste of something her body has dumped-adrenaline would be the most likely possibility-flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill the little blue van once again lurches across the white line. The driver corrects the drift …  no, overcorrects. Once mare the blue van is on the righthand shoulder, spuming up yellow dust for fifty yards.

"Gosh, I hope Stephen King sees that asshole, "Elvira says. They have passed the writer half a mile or so back, and said hello. Probably everyone in town has seen him on his afternoon walk, at one time or another.

As if the driver of the blue van has heard Elvira Toothaker call him an asshole, the van's brakelights flare. The van suddenly pulls all the way off the mad and stops. When the door opens, the ladies hear a louder blast of rock and roll music. They also hear the driver-a man-yelling at someone (Elvira and Justine just pity the person stuck driving with that guy on such a beautiful June afternoon). "You leave 'at alone!" he shouts. "That ain't yoahs, y 'hear? "And then the driver reaches back into the van, brings out a cane, and uses it to help him over the rock wall and into the bushes. The van sits rumbling on the soft shoulder, driver's door open, emitting blue exhaust from one end and rock from the other.

"What's he doing?" Justine asks, a little nervously.

"Taking a leak would be my guess, "her friend replies. "But if Mr.

King back there is lucky, maybe doing Number Two, instead. That might give him time to get off Route 7 and back onto Turtleback Lane."