The Dark Tower

Roland returned this greeting, then turned to Jake. The boy gave him an uncertain look. Roland nodded at him, and Jake came. Now Jake and Sheemie stood facing each other with Roland hunkered between them, seeming to look at neither now that they were brought together.

Jake raised a hand to his forehead.

Sheemie returned the gesture.

Jake looked down at Roland and said, “What do you want?”

Roland didn’t answer, only continued to look serenely toward the mouth of the cave, as if there were something in the apparently endless murk out there which interested him. And Jake knew what was wanted, as surely as if he had used the touch on Roland’s mind to find out (which he most certainly had not). They had come to a fork in the road. It had been Jake who’d suggested Sheemie should be the one to tell them which branch to take. At the time it had seemed like a weirdly good idea—who knew why. Now, looking into that earnest, not-very-bright face and those bloodshot eyes, Jake wondered two things: what had ever possessed him to suggest such a course of action, and why someone—probably Eddie, who retained a relatively hard head in spite of all they’d been through—hadn’t told him, kindly but firmly, that putting their future in Sheemie Ruiz’s hands was a dumb idea. Totally noodgy, as his old schoolmates back at Piper might have said. Now Roland, who believed that even in the shadow of death there were still lessons to be learned, wanted Jake to ask the question Jake himself had proposed, and the answer would no doubt expose him as the superstitious scatterbrain he had become. Yet still, why not ask? Even if it were the equivalent of flipping a coin, why not? Jake had come, possibly at the end of a short but undeniably interesting life, to a place where there were magic doors, mechanical butlers, telepathy (of which he was capable, at least to some small degree, himself), vampires, and were-spiders. So why not let Sheemie choose? They had to go one way or the other, after all, and he’d been through too goddam much to worry about such a paltry thing as looking like an idiot in front of his companions. Besides, he thought, if I’m not among friends here, I never will be.

“Sheemie,” he said. Looking into those bloody eyes was sort of horrible, but he made himself do it. “We’re on a quest. That means we have a job to do. We—”

“You have to save the Tower,” said Sheemie. “And my old friend is to go in, and mount to the top, and see what’s to see. There may be renewal, there may be death, or there may be both. He was Will Dearborn once, aye, so he was. Will Dearborn to me.”

Jake glanced at Roland, who was still hunkered down, looking out of the cave. But Jake thought his face had gone pale and strange.

One of Roland’s fingers made his twirling go-ahead gesture.

“Yes, we’re supposed to save the Dark Tower,” Jake agreed. And thought he understood some of Roland’s lust to see it and enter it, even if it killed him. What lay at the center of the universe? What man (or boy) could but wonder, once the question was thought of, and want to see?

Even if looking drove him mad?

“But in order to do that, we have to do two jobs. One involves going back to our world and saving a man. A writer who’s telling our story. The other job is the one we’ve been talking about. Freeing the Breakers.” Honesty made him add: “Or stopping them, at least. Do you understand?”

But this time Sheemie didn’t reply. He was looking where Roland was looking, out into the murk. His face was that of someone who’s been hypnotized. Looking at it made Jake uneasy, but he pushed on. He had come to his question, after all, and where else was there to go but on?

“The question is, which job do we do first? It’d seem that saving the writer might be easier because there’s no opposition . . . that we know of, anyway . . . but there’s a chance that . . . well . . .” Jake didn’t want to say But there’s a chance that teleporting us might kill you, and so came to a lame and unsatisfying halt.

For a moment he didn’t think Sheemie would make any reply, leaving him with the job of deciding whether or not to try again, but then the former tavern-boy spoke. He looked at none of them as he did so, but only out of the cave and into the dim of Thunderclap.

“I had a dream last night, so I did,” said Sheemie of Mejis, whose life had once been saved by three young gunslingers from Gilead. “I dreamed I was back at the Travellers’ Rest, only Coral wasn’t there, nor Stanley, nor Pettie, nor Sheb—him that used to play the pianer. There was nobbut me, and I was moppin the floor and singin ‘Careless Love.’ Then the batwings screeked, so they did, they had this funny sound they made . . .”

Jake saw that Roland was nodding, a trace of a smile on his lips.