The Dark Tower

Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Of course, it’s all nineteen. Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake’s left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.

Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my basket. But what basket? What does it mean?

Four

Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum’s twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer and she was just getting wa’amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazily back and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with the car’s motion like corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debris which collects in any old car that’s been hard-used: the ashes and pens and paperclips and the world’s oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat and pine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door.

Someone passing would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff — and people! people who might be dead! — floating around in the car like jetsam in a space capsule. But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lake were mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even though there was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke was almost gone.

Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him. Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways motion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek.

Five

Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as well. That was why she’d labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of them. The boy and the Pere had entered the Dixie Pig, a thing that was either very brave or very foolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on what they’d found there.

Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had come ready to fight. Callahan was holding Jake’s gun…and another thing, as well: some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of the little gods. The boy had Susannah’s ’Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved from only the gods knew where.

The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanity ended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she’d been wearing hung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood a good many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not his attention — like that of the boy and the Pere at this very moment — been focused on other matters.

Callahan’s low men, for instance. They might well be taheen, creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two. They certainly weren’t the sort of beings Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen as a result of the old ones’ ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, they might be genuine taheen, sometimes known as the third people or the can-toi, and yes, Roland should have known. How many of the taheen now served the being known as the Crimson King? Some? Many?

All?

If the third answer was the correct one, Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger’s nature, and in this case his lack of imagination was surely a blessing.

Six

He saw what he needed to see. Although the can-toi — Callahan’s low folk — had surrounded Jake and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn’t even seen the duo behind them, the ones who’d been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street), the Pere had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with the key he’d found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort to grab it.