The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7)

by Stephen King

Hell wit’choo, bad boy, I’m wit’ my homies and I ain’t ascairt.

his brothers, his sister-mother, the pet billy, and, of course, overseeing them all, Big White Ka-Daddy.

“Because I’m a telepath,” Ted says. “And that’s what you’re really looking for.” He tries to keep his poker face and thinks he succeeds pretty well, but inside he’s filled with a great and singing relief. Because he’s found a job? No. Because they’ll shortly make him an offer that would make the prizes on the new TV quiz shows look tame? No. Because someone finally wants what he can do. Because someone finally wants him.

“Because talent won’t be quiet, doesn’t know how to be quiet,” he said. “Whether it’s a talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It’ll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, ‘Use me, use me, use me! I’m tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!’”

Besides, he thought, if I’m not among friends here, I never will be.

“Aye, Will Dearborn that was, right at me, so he did, and said ‘Why must you hurt me, when I love you so? When I can do nothing else nor want to, for love made me and fed me and—’” “‘And kept me in better days,’” Eddie murmured. A tear fell from one of his eyes and made a dark spot on the floor of the cave. “‘—and kept me in better days? Why will you cut me, and disfigure my face, and fill me with woe? I have only loved you for your beauty as you once loved me for mine in the days before the world moved on. Now you scar me with nails and put burning drops of quicksilver in my nose; you have set the animals on me, so you have, and they have eaten of my softest parts. Around me the can-toi gather and there’s no peace from their laughter. Yet still I love you and would serve you and even bring the magic again, if you would allow me, for that is how my heart was cast when I rose from the Prim. And once I was strong as well as beautiful, but now my strength is almost gone.’” “You cried,” Susannah said, and Jake thought: Of course he did. He was crying himself. So was Ted; so was Dinky Earnshaw. Only Roland was dry-eyed, and the gunslinger was pale, so pale. “He wept,” said Sheemie (tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told his dream), “and I did, too, for I could see that he had been fair as daylight. He said, ‘If the torture were to stop now, I might still recover—if never my looks, then at least my strength—’” “‘My kes,’” Jake said, and although he’d never heard the word ...

“We are ka-tet,” Roland said, and in unison they answered: “We are one from many.”

For now the writer was fine, happily frittering away his time and valuable imagination on some meaningless project while the world he’d been born to imagine continued to gather dust in his head.

As for risk, they were six planning to take on sixty. Or more. Of course there would be risk, and of course there would be blood. Blood and fire.

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to recreate the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

NINETEEN

“You mustn’t use your good-mind to steal my grief,” Susannah told him, “for I’d open my mouth and drink it to the dregs. Every drop.”

“All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.’”

“I used to work for this guy before I came here,” Dinky said. “Mr. Sharpton, his name was. He used to tell me that never’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.”

Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. “Did that creature just say fuck, young man?”

“Ayuh, seems likely t’me.” And then, still like a man who dreams awake, he tucked his hat beneath his arm, raised a fist to his forehead, and bent a leg to the stranger with the big revolver on his hip. Why would he not? The stranger was surrounded by white light.

An old saying—one taught to him by his father—came to Roland then: If ka will say so, let it be so. Yes; all right; let it be so.

He had been bewitched by that cold romance the loveless mistake for love.

Even the Crimson King ceases his angry screaming. For it is the Dark Tower that will decide.

Should Jake pass into the clearing while his back was turned . . . if ka will say so, let it be so.

And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,’” King said dreamily. “I wish I could write that.”

Roland’s eyes were dry and hot, throbbing in their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the ability to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of this—after what he’d regained and then lost again—what good was any of it?

“You just can’t stay here any longer, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? You hear it calling. The Tower.”

Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family.

Ka-tet was love.

“There are other worlds than these.”

“Then I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love.”

“It won’t,” she said. “And if this is to be my last sight of you—my heart says it is—then don’t let it be of you on your knees. You’re not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven, never were, and I don’t want to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as you were in Calla Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill.”

When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death. But not for you, gunslinger, she thought. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may I do fine.

“It could be a trick,” he said, most certainly reading her mind. “Life is a trick, love a glammer,” she replied. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path.” “As you say so, let it be so,”

It occurred to him that if he had never loved them, he would never have felt so alone as this. Yet of all his many regrets, the re-opening of his heart was not among them, even now.

And it’s here we must join him—sink into him—although how we will ever con the vantage of Roland’s heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some moments are beyond imagination.

He felt light-headed, not really there. It occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some vast change, and that was what he felt now.

Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion.

“Thank God,” he says. “I’d just about decided I’d have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That . . . well . . .” He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. “Listen, you are here for me, aren’t you? Please tell me I’m not making an utter ass of myself. Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those things because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it’s true.

Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn’t know how it can be, but yes, it’s going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.

“If I asked how I know you . . . or where you come from . . .” He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. “Or how I can possibly love you already . . . ?”

Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live. Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live. That’s all. That’s enough. Say thankya.

This is a place of death, he thought, and not just here. All these rooms. Every floor. Yes, gunslinger, whispered the Voice of the Tower. But only because your life has made it so.