The Dark Tower

Pimli sent Finli a series of bright images: a champagne bottle breaking over the stern of a boat; hundreds of flat black graduation caps rising in the air; a flag being planted on Mount Everest; a laughing couple escaping a church with their heads bent against a pelting storm of rice; a planet—Earth—suddenly glowing with fierce brilliance.

Images that all said the same thing.

“Yes,” Finli said, and Pimli wondered how he could ever have thought those eyes hard to read. “Yes, indeed. Success at the end of the day.”

Neither of them looked down at that moment. Had they done, they would have seen Ted Brautigan—an old dog, yes, and tired, but perhaps not quite as tired as some thought—looking up at them.

With a ghost of his own smile.

NINE

There was never rain out here, at least not during Pimli’s years, but sometimes, in the Stygian blackness of its nights, there were great volleys of dry thunder. Most of the Devar-Toi’s staff had trained themselves to sleep through these fusillades, but Pimli often woke up, heart hammering in his throat, the Our Father running through his mostly unconscious mind like a circle of spinning red ribbon.

Earlier that day, talking to Finli, the Master of Algul Siento had used the phrase hinky-di-di with a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child’s phrase, almost, like allee-allee-in-free or eenie-meenie-minie-moe.

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 double-boom 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 the tub of poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to little more than a senile mutter, then 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.