The Dark Tower

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 Roland let 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 Lady 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.