The Dark Tower

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin he heard his father say, and his mother, much more gravely, as if she knew storytelling was serious business: I heard a fly buzz…when I died.

From behind the door there was nothing. From behind Jake, the chanting voices of the Crimson King’s posse swept closer.

“Susannah!” he bawled, and when there was no answer this time he turned, put his back to the door (hadn’t he always known it would end just this way, with his back to a locked door?), and seized an Oriza in each hand. Oy stood between his feet, and now his fur was bushed out, now the velvety-soft skin of his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.

Jake crossed his arms, assuming “the load.”

“Come on then, you bastards,” he said. “For Gilead and the Eld. For Roland, son of Steven. For me and Oy.”

At first he was too fiercely concentrated on dying well, of taking at least one of them with him (the fellow who’d told him the Faddah was dinnah would be his personal preference) and more if he could, to realize the voice he was hearing had come from the other side of the door rather than from his own mind.

“Jake! Is it really you, sugarpie?”

His eyes widened. Oh please let it not be a trick. If it was, Jake reckoned that he would never be played another.

“Susannah, they’re coming! Do you know how—”

“Yes! Should still be chassit, do you hear me? If Nigel’s right, the word should still be cha—”

Jake didn’t give her a chance to finish saying it again. Now he could see them sweeping toward him, running full-out. Some waving guns and already shooting into the air.

“Chassit!” he yelled. “Chassit for the Tower! Open! Open, you son of a bitch!”

Behind his pressing back the door between New York and Fedic clicked open. At the head of the charging posse, Flaherty saw it happen, uttered the bitterest curse in his lexicon, and fired a single bullet. He was a good shot, and all the force of his not inconsiderable will went with that particular slug, guiding it. No doubt it would have punched through Jake’s forehead above the left eye, entering his brain and ending his life, had not a strong, brown-fingered hand seized Jake by the collar at that very moment and yanked him backward through the shrill elevator-shaft whistle that sounds endlessly between the levels of the Dark Tower. The bullet buzzed by his head instead of entering it.

Oy came with him, barking his friend’s name shrilly—Ake-Ake, Ake-Ake! — and the door slammed shut behind them. Flaherty reached it twenty seconds later and hammered on it until his fists bled (when Lamla tried to restrain him, Flaherty thrust him back with such ferocity that the taheen went a-sprawl), but there was nothing he could do. Hammering did not work; cursing did not work; nothing worked.

At the very last minute, the boy and the bumbler had eluded them. For yet a little while longer the core of Roland’s ka-tet remained unbroken.

Chapter VI: On Turtleback Lane

One

See this, I do beg ya, and see it very well, for it’s one of the most beautiful places that still remain in America.

I’d show you a homely dirt lane running along a heavily wooded switchback ridge in western Maine, its north and south ends spilling onto Route 7 about two miles apart. Just west of this ridge, like a jeweler’s setting, is a deep green dimple in the landscape. At the bottom of it — the stone in the setting — is Kezar Lake. Like all mountain lakes, it may change its aspect half a dozen times in the course of a single day, for here the weather is beyond prankish; you could call it half-mad and be perfectly accurate. The locals will be happy to tell you about ice-cream snow flurries that came to this part of the world once in late August (that would be 1948) and once spang on the Glorious Fourth (1959). They’ll be even more delighted to tell you about the tornado that came blasting across the lake’s frozen surface in January of 1971, sucking up snow and creating a whirling mini-blizzard that crackled with thunder in its middle. Hard to believe such crazy-jane weather, but you could go and see Gary Barker, if you don’t believe me; he’s got the pictures to prove it.