The Dark Tower

Susannah thought to tell them about the vision she’d had as Mia was beginning her final journey from the Plaza-Park Hotel to the Dixie Pig. In this vision she’d been jugged in a jail cell in Oxford, Mississippi, and there had been voices coming from a TV somewhere. Chet Huntley, Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee: newscasters chanting the names of the dead. Some of those names, like President Kennedy and the Diem brothers, she’d known. Others, like Christa McAuliffe, she had not. But one of the names had been Stephen King’s, she was quite sure of it. Chet Huntley’s partner (good night Chet good night David) saying that Stephen King had been struck and killed by a Dodge minivan while walking near his house. King had been fifty-two, according to Brinkley.

Had Susannah told them that, a great many things might have happened differently, or not at all. She was opening her mouth to add it into the conversation — a falling chip on a hillside strikes a stone which strikes a larger stone which then strikes two others and starts a landslide — when there was the clunk of an opening door and the clack of approaching footsteps. They all turned, Jake reaching for a ’Riza, the others for their guns.

“Relax, fellas,” Susannah murmured. “It’s all right. I know this guy.” And then to DNK 45932, DOMESTIC, she said: “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. In fact, I didn’t expect to see you at all. What’s up, Nigel old buddy?”

So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a late-spring day in the year of ’99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted their parts below.

Three

The nice thing about robots, in Susannah’s opinion, was that most of them didn’t hold grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual equipment (although he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access to the right components, discs, and repair tutorials), so he had come back here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains of the shattered (and completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and introduced himself to her friends.

“Nice to meet you, Nige,” Eddie said, “but you’ll want to get started on those repairs, I kennit, so we won’t keep you.” Eddie’s voice was pleasant and he’d reholstered his gun, but he kept his hand on the butt. In truth he was a little bit freaked by the resemblance Nigel bore to a certain messenger robot in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. That one had held a grudge.

“No, stay,” Roland said. “We may have chores for you, but for the time being I’d as soon you were quiet. Turned off, if it please you.” And if it doesn’t, his tone implied.

“Certainly, sai,” Nigel replied in his plummy British accent. “You may reactivate me with the words Nigel, I need you.”

“Very good,” Roland said.

Nigel folded his scrawny (but undoubtedly powerful) stainless-steel arms across his chest and went still.

“Came back to pick up the broken glass,” Eddie marveled. “Maybe the Tet Corporation could sell em. Every housewife in America would want two — one for the house and one for the yard.”

“The less we’re involved with science, the better,” Susannah said darkly. In spite of her brief nap while leaning against the door between Fedic and New York, she looked haggard, done almost to death. “Look where it’s gotten this world.”

Roland nodded to Jake, who told of his and Pere Callahan’s adventures in the New York of 1999, beginning with the taxi that had almost hit Oy and ending with their two-man attack on the low men and the vampires in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. He did not neglect to tell how they had disposed of Black Thirteen by putting it in a storage locker at the World Trade Center, where it would be safe until early June of 2002, and how they had found the turtle, which Susannah had dropped, like a message in a bottle, in the gutter outside the Dixie Pig.

“So brave,” Susannah said, and ruffled Jake’s hair. Then she bent to stroke Oy’s head. The bumbler stretched his long neck to maximize the caress, his eyes half-closed and a grin on his foxy little face. “So damned brave. Thankee-sai, Jake.”

“Thank Ake!” Oy agreed.

“If it hadn’t been for the turtle, they would have gotten us both.” Jake’s voice was steady, but he had gone pale. “As it was, the Pere…he…” Jake wiped away a tear with the heel of his hand and gazed at Roland. “You used his voice to send me on. I heard you.”

“Aye, I had to,” the gunslinger agreed. “ ’Twas no more than what he wanted.”

Jake said, “The vampires didn’t get him. He used my Ruger before they could take his blood and change him into one of them. I don’t think they would’ve done that, anyway. They would have torn him apart and eaten him. They were mad.”

Roland was nodding.