The Dark Tower

His hand on her breast. His breath on her neck. After some endless time that might have been an hour or only five minutes, his breathing lengthened, and she knew he had gone to sleep. She was pleased and disappointed at the same time. A few minutes later she went to sleep herself, and it was the best rest she’d had in years. If he had bad dreams of his gone friends, he did not disturb her with them. When she woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and he was standing naked at the window, looking out through a slit he’d made in the curtains with one finger.

“Did you sleep?” she asked.

“A little. Will we go on?”

Fifteen

They could have been in Manhattan by three o’clock in the afternoon, and the drive into the city on a Sunday would have been far easier than during the Monday morning rush hour, but hotel rooms in New York were expensive and even doubling up would have necessitated breaking out a credit card. They stayed at a Motel 6 in Harwich, Connecticut, instead. She took only a single room and that night he made love to her. Not because he exactly wanted to, she sensed, but because he understood it was what she wanted. Perhaps what she needed.

It was extraordinary, although she could not have said precisely how; despite the feel of all those scars beneath her hands — some rough, some smooth — there was the sense of making love to a dream. And that night she did dream. It was a field filled with roses she dreamed of, and a huge Tower made of slate-black stone standing at the far end. Partway up, red lamps glowed…only she had an idea they weren’t lamps at all, but eyes.

Terrible eyes.

She heard many singing voices, thousands of them, and understood that some were the voices of his lost friends. She awoke with tears on her cheeks and a feeling of loss even though he was still beside her. After today she’d see him no more. And that was for the best. Still, she would have given anything in her life to have him make love to her again, even though she understood it had not been really her he had been making love to; even when he came into her, his thoughts had been far away, with those voices.

Those lost voices.

Chapter III: New York Again (Roland Shows ID)

One

On the morning of Monday the 21st of June in the year of ’99, the sun shone down on New York City just as if Jake Chambers did not lie dead in one world and Eddie Dean in another; as if Stephen King did not lie in a Lewiston hospital’s Intensive Care ward, drifting out into the light of consciousness only for brief intervals; as if Susannah Dean did not sit alone with her grief aboard a train racing on ancient, chancy tracks across the dark wastes of Thunderclap toward the ghost-town of Fedic. There were others who had elected to accompany her on her journey at least that far, but she’d asked them to give her space, and they had complied with her wish. She knew she would feel better if she could cry, but so far she hadn’t been able to do that — a few random tears, like meaningless showers in the desert, was the best she had been able to manage — although she had a terrible feeling that things were worse than she knew.

Fuck, dat ain’t no “feelin,” Detta crowed contemptuously from her place deep inside, as Susannah sat looking out at the dark and rocky wastelands or the occasional ruins of towns and villages that had been abandoned when the world moved on. You havin a jenna-wine intuition, girl! Only question you cain’t answer is whether it be ole long tall and ugly or Young Master Sweetness now visitin wit’ yo man in the clearin.

“Please, no,” she murmured. “Please not either of them, God, I can’t stand another one.”

But God remained deaf to her prayer, Jake remained dead, the Dark Tower remained standing at the end of Can’-Ka No Rey, casting its shadow over a million shouting roses, and in New York the hot summer sun shone down on the just and the unjust alike.

Can you give me hallelujah?

Thankee-sai.

Now somebody yell me a big old God-bomb amen.

Two