Song of Susannah (21 page)

Roland pulled John to him so he could speak quietly. “We need to get out of here right now. Can you help us?”

“Oh, ayuh, I think so.” The wind shifted. A draft blew through the mercantile’s broken front windows, through the place where the back wall had been, and out the back door. The diesel smoke was black and oily. John coughed and waved it away. “Follow me. Let’s step lively.”

John hurried across the ugly acre of waste ground behind the store, stepping over a broken crate and weaving his way between a rusty incinerator
and a pile of even rustier machine parts. There was a name on the biggest of these that Roland had seen before in his wanderings:
JOHN DEERE
.

Roland and Eddie walked backward, protecting John’s back, taking little glances over their own shoulders to keep from tripping. Roland hadn’t entirely given up hope that Andolini would make a final charge and he could kill him, as he had done once before. On the beach of the Western Sea, that had been, and here he was again, not only back but ten years
younger.

While I,
Roland thought,
feel at least a thousand years older.

Yet that was not really true. Yes, he was now suffering—finally—the ills an old man could reasonably expect. But he had a ka-tet to protect again, and not just any ka-tet but one of
gunslingers,
and they had refreshed his life in a way he never would have expected. It all meant something to him again, not just the Dark Tower but
all
of it. So he wanted Andolini to come. And if he killed Andolini in this world, he had an idea Andolini would stay dead. Because this world was
different.
It had a resonance all the others, even his own, lacked. He felt it in every bone and every nerve. Roland looked up and saw exactly what he expected: clouds in a line. At the rear of the barren acre, a path slipped into the woods, its head marked by a pair of good-sized granite rocks. And here the gunslinger saw herringbone patterns of shadows, overlapping but all pointing the same way. You had to look to see it, but once seen it was unmistakable. As in the version of New York
where they had found the empty bag in the vacant lot and Susannah had seen the vagrant dead, this was the true world, the one where time always ran in a single direction. They might be able to hop into the future if they could find a door, as he was sure Jake and Callahan had done (for Roland also remembered the poem on the fence, and now understood at least part of it), but they could never return to the past. This was the true world, the one where no roll of the dice could ever be taken back, the one closest to the Dark Tower. And they were still on the Path of the Beam.

John led them onto the way into the woods and quickly down it, away from the rising pillars of thick dark smoke and the approaching whine of the sirens.

They hadn’t gone even a quarter of a mile before Eddie began seeing blue glints through the trees. The path was slippery with pine needles, and when they came to the final slope—the one leading down to a long and narrow lake of surpassing loveliness—Eddie saw that someone had built a birch railing. Beyond it was a stub of dock jutting out into the water. Tied to the dock was a motorboat.

“That’s mine,” John said. “I come over for m’groceries and a bite of lunch. Didn’t expect no excitement.”

“Well, you got it,” Eddie said.

“Ayuh, that’s a true thing. Mind this last bit, if you don’t want to go on your keister.” John went
nimbly down the final slope, holding the rail for balance and sliding rather than walking. On his feet was a pair of old scuffed workboots that would have looked perfectly at home in Mid-World, Eddie thought.

He went next himself, favoring his bad leg. Roland brought up the rear. From behind them came a sudden explosion, as sharp and limber as that first high-powered rifleshot but far louder.

“That’d be Chip’s propane,” John said.

“Cry pardon?” Roland asked.

“Gas,” Eddie said quietly. “He means gas.”

“Ayuh, stove-gas,” John agreed. He stepped into his boat, grabbed the Evinrude’s starter-cord, gave it a yank. The engine, a sturdy little twenty-horse sewing machine of a thing, started on the first pull. “Get in here, boys, and let’s us vacate t’ area,” he grunted.

Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.

The skiff moved as quietly and as gracefully over the water as any motor-powered thing can, skating on its own reflection beneath a sky of summer’s most pellucid blue. Behind them the plume of dark smoke sullied that blue, rising higher and higher, spreading as it went. Dozens of folk, most of them
in shorts or bathing costumes, stood upon the banks of this little lake, turned in the smoke’s direction, hands raised to shade against the sun. Few if any marked the steady (and completely unshowy) passage of the motorboat.

“This is Keywadin Pond, just in case you were wonderin,” John said. He pointed ahead of them, where another gray tongue of dock stuck out. Beside this one was a neat little boathouse, white with green trim, its overhead door open. As they neared it, Roland and Eddie could see both a canoe and a kayak bobbing inside, at tether.

“Boathouse is mine,” the man in the flannel shirt added. The
boat
in
boathouse
came out in a way impossible to reproduce with mere letters—
bwut
would probably come closest—but which both men recognized. It was the way the word was spoken in the Calla.

“Looks well-kept,” Eddie said. Mostly to be saying
something.

“Oh, ayuh,” John said. “I do caretakin, camp-checkin, some rough carpenterin. Wouldn’t look good f’business if I had a fallin-down boathouse, would it?”

Eddie smiled. “Suppose not.”

“My place is about half a mile back from the water. Name’s John Cullum.” He held out his right hand to Roland, continuing to steer a straight course away from the rising pillar of smoke and toward the boathouse with the other.

Roland took the hand, which was pleasantly rough. “I’m Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Long days and pleasant nights, John.”

Eddie put out his own hand in turn. “Eddie Dean, from Brooklyn. Nice to meet you.”

John shook with him easily enough but his eyes studied Eddie closely. When their hands parted, he said: “Young fella, did somethin just happen? It did, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. Not with complete honesty.

“You ain’t been to Brooklyn for a long time, son, have you?”

“Ain’t been to Morehouse or to
no
house,” Eddie Dean said, and then quickly, before he could lose it: “Mia’s locked Susannah away. Locked her away in the year of ’99. Suze can get to the Dogan, but going there’s no good. Mia’s locked off the controls. There’s nothing Suze can do. She’s kidnapped. She . . . she . . .”

He stopped. For a moment everything had been so
clear,
like a dream upon the instant of waking. Then, as so often happens with dreams, it faded. He didn’t even know if it had been a real message from Susannah, or pure imagination.

Young fella, did somethin just happen?

So Cullum had felt it, too. Not imagination, then. Some form of the touch seemed more likely.

John waited, and when there was no more from Eddie, turned to Roland. “Does your pal come over funny that way often?”

“Not often, no. Sai . . .
Mister,
I mean. Mister Cullum, I thank you for helping us when we needed help. I thank ya big-big. It would be monstrous impudent of us to ask for more, but—”

“But you’re gonna. Ayuh, figgered.” John made
a minute course correction toward the little boathouse with its square open mouth. Roland estimated they’d be there in five minutes. That was fine by him. He had no objection to riding in this tight little motor-powered boat (even though it rode rather low in the water with the weight of three grown men inside), but Keywadin Pond was far too exposed for his taste. If Jack Andolini (or his successor, should Jack be replaced) asked enough of those shore-gawkers, he would eventually find a few who remembered the little skiff with the three men in it. And the boathouse with the neat green trim.
John Cullum’s bwut-huss, may it do ya fine,
these witnesses would say. Best they should be farther along the Beam before that happened, with John Cullum packed off to somewhere safe. Roland judged “safe” in this case to be perhaps three looks to the horizon-line, or about a hundred wheels. He had no doubt that Cullum, a total stranger, had saved their lives by stepping in decisively at the right moment. The last thing he wanted was for the man to lose his own as a result.

“Well, I’ll do what I can for ya, already made up m’mind to that, but I got to ask you somethin now, while I got the chance.”

Eddie and Roland exchanged a brief look. Roland said, “We’ll answer if we can. Which is to say, John of East Stoneham, if we judge that the answer won’t cause you harm.”

John nodded. He seemed to gather himself. “I know you’re not ghosts, because we all saw you back at the store and I just now touched you to shake hands. I can see the shadders you cast.” He
pointed at where they lay across the side of the boat. “Real as real. So my question is this: are you walk-ins?”

“Walk-ins,” Eddie said. He looked at Roland, but Roland’s face was completely blank. Eddie looked back at John Cullum, sitting in the stern of the boat and steering them toward the boathouse. “I’m sorry, but I don’t . . .”

“Been a lot of em around here, last few years,” John said. “Waterford, Stoneham, East Stoneham, Lovell, Sweden . . . even over in Bridgton and Denmark.” This last township name came out
Denmaaaaak.

He saw they were still puzzled.

“Walk-ins’re people who just
appear,
” he said. “Sometimes they’re dressed in old-fashioned clothes, as if they came from . . .
ago,
I guess you’d say. One was nekkid as a jaybird, walkin right up the middle of Route 5. Junior Angstrom seen im. Last November this was. Sometimes they talk other languages. One came to Don Russert’s house over in Waterford. Sat right there in the kitchen! Donnie’s a retired history professor from Vanderbilt College and he taped the fella. Fella jabbered quite awhile, then went into the laundry room. Donnie figured he must’a taken it for the bathroom and went after him to turn him around, but the fella was already gone. No door for him to go out of, but gone he was.

“Donnie played that tape of his for just about everyone in the Vandy Languages Department (
Depaaa-aatment
), and wasn’t none of em recognized it. One said it must be a completely made-up language, like Esperanto. Do you sabby Esperanto, boys?”

Roland shook his head. Eddie said (cautiously), “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it i—”

“And sometimes,” John said, his voice lowering as they glided into the shadows of the boathouse, “sometimes they’re hurt. Or disfigured. Roont.”

Roland started so suddenly and so hard that the boat rocked. For a moment they were actually in danger of being tipped out. “What? What do you say? Speak again, John, for I would hear it very well.”

John apparently thought it was purely an issue of verbal comprehension, because this time he was at pains to pronounce the word more carefully. “
Ruined.
Like folks who’d been in a nuclear war, or a fallout zone, or something.”

“Slow mutants,” Roland said. “I think he might be talking about slow muties. Here in this town.”

Eddie nodded, thinking about the Grays and Pubes in Lud. Also thinking about a misshapen beehive and the monstrous insects which had been crawling over it.

John killed the little Evinrude engine, but for a moment the three of them sat where they were, listening to water slap hollowly against the aluminum sides of the boat.

“Slow mutants,” the old fellow said, almost seeming to taste the words. “Ayuh, I guess that’d be as good a name for em as any. But they ain’t the only ones. There’s been animals, too, and kinds of birds no one’s ever seen in these parts. But mostly it’s the walk-ins that’ve got people worried and talkin amongst themselves. Donnie Russert called someone he knew at Duke University, and that fella
called someone in their Department of Psychic Studies—amazin they’ve got such a thing as that in a real college, but it appears they do—and the Psychic Studies woman said that’s what such folks are called: walk-ins. And then, when they disappear again—which they always do, except for one fella over in East Conway Village, who died—they’re called walk-
outs.
The lady said that some scientists who study such things—I guess you could call em scientists, although I know a lot of folks might argue—b’lieve that walk-ins are aliens from other planets, that spaceships drop em off and then pick em up again, but most of em think they’re time-travelers, or from different Earths that lie in a line with ours.”

“How long has this been going on?” Eddie asked. “How long have the walk-ins been showing up?”

“Oh, two or three years. And it’s gettin worse ruther’n better. I seen a couple of such fellas myself, and once a woman with a bald head who looked like she had this bleedin eye in the middle of her forread. But they was all at a distance, and you fellas are up close.”

John leaned toward them over his bony knees, his eyes (as blue as Roland’s own) gleaming. Water slapped hollowly at the boat. Eddie felt a strong urge to take John Cullum’s hand again, to see if something else would happen. There was another Dylan song called “Visions of Johanna.” What Eddie wanted was not a vision of Johanna, but the name was at least close to that.

“Ayuh,” John was saying, “you boys are right up close and personal. Now, I’ll help you along
your way if I can, because I don’t sense nothing the least bit bad about either of you (although I’m going to tell you flat out that I ain’t
never
seen such shooting), but I want to know: are you walk-ins or not?”