The Waste Lands (46 page)

“There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?”

“But—”

“All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw
gunslingers
. Most were lax and slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient
ka-tet
.”

“Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them.”

“Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one almost took me down. Except for blind luck—Mort’s flint-and-steel—he would have done. That one . . . I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well. And then . . . do you remember the name of Balazar’s nightclub?”

“Sure,” Eddie said uneasily. “The Leaning Tower. But it could have been coincidence; you yourself said
ka
doesn’t rule everything.”

Roland nodded. “You really are like Cuthbert—I remember something he said when we were boys. We were planning a midnight lark in the cemetery, but Alain wouldn’t go. He said he was afraid of offending the shades of his fathers and mothers. Cuthbert laughed at him. He said he wouldn’t believe in ghosts until he caught one in his teeth.”

“Good for him!” Eddie exclaimed. “Bravo!”

Roland smiled. “I thought you’d like that. At any rate, let’s leave this ghost for now. Go on with your story.”

Eddie told of the vision which had come to him when Roland threw the jawbone into the fire-the vision of the key and the rose. He told of his dream, and how he had walked through the door of Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli and into the field of roses which was dominated by the tall, soot-colored Tower. He told of the blackness which had issued from its windows, forming a shape in the sky overhead, speaking directly to Jake now, because Jake was listening with hungry concentration and growing wonder. He tried to convey some sense of the exaltation and terror which had permeated the dream, and saw from their eyes-Jake’s most of all-that he was either doing a better job of that than he could have hoped for . . . or that they’d had dreams of their own.

He told of following Shardik’s backtrail to the Portal of the Bear, and how, when he put his head against it, he’d found himself remembering the day he had talked his brother into taking him to Dutch Hill, so he could see The Mansion. He told about the cup and the needle, and how the pointing needle had become unnecessary once they realized they could see the Beam at work in everything it touched, even the birds in the sky.

Susannah took up the tale at this point. As she spoke, telling of how Eddie had begun to carve his own version of the key, Jake lay back, laced his hands together behind his head, and watched the clouds run slowly toward the city on their straight southeasterly course. The orderly shape they made showed the presence of the Beam as clearly as smoke leaving a chimney shows the direction of the wind.

She finished with the story of how they had finally hauled Jake into this world, closing the split track of his and Roland’s memories as suddenly and as completely as Eddie had closed the door in the speaking ring. The only fact she left out was really not a fact at all-at least, not yet. She’d had no morning sickness, after all, and a single missed period meant nothing by itself. As Roland himself might have said, that was a tale best left for another day.

Yet as she finished, she found herself wishing she could forget what Aunt Talitha had said when Jake told her this was his home now:
Gods pity you, then, for the sun is going down on this world. It’s going down forever
.

“And now it’s your turn, Jake,” Roland said.

Jake sat up and looked toward Lud, where the windows of the western towers reflected back the late afternoon light in golden sheets. “It’s all crazy,” he murmured, “but it almost makes sense. Like a dream when you wake up.”

“Maybe we can help you make sense of it,” Susannah said.

“Maybe you can. At least you can help me think about the train. I’m tired of trying to make sense of Blaine by myself.” He sighed. “You know what Roland went through, living two lives at the same time, so I can skip that part. I’m not sure I could ever explain how it felt, anyway, and I don’t want to. It was gross. I guess I better start with my Final Essay, because that’s when I finally stopped thinking that the whole thing might just go away.” He looked around at them somberly. “That was when I gave up.”

JAKE TALKED THE SUN down.

He told them everything he could remember, beginning with
My Understanding of Truth
and ending with the monstrous doorkeeper which had literally come out of the woodwork to attack him. The other three listened without a single interruption.

When he was finished, Roland turned to Eddie, his eyes bright with a mixture of emotions Eddie initially took for wonder. Then he realized he was looking at powerful excitement . . . and deep fear. His mouth went dry. Because if
Roland
was afraid—“Do you still doubt that our worlds overlap each other, Eddie?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. I walked down the same street,
and I did it in his clothes
! But . . . Jake, can I see that book?
Charlie the
Choo-Choo?”

Jake reached for his pack, but Roland stayed his hand. “Not yet,” he said. “Go back to the vacant lot, Jake: Tell that part once more. Try to remember everything.”

“Maybe you should hypnotize me,” Jake said hesitantly. “Like you did before, at the. way station.”

Roland shook his head. “There’s no need. What happened to you in that lot was the most important thing ever to happen in your life, Jake. In all our lives. You can remember everything.”

So Jake went through it again. It was clear to all of them that his experience in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry’s once had stood was the secret heart of the
ka-tet
they shared. In Eddie’s dream, the Artistic Deli had still been standing; in Jake’s reality it had been torn down, but in both cases it was a place of enormous, talismanic power. Nor did Roland doubt that the vacant lot with its broken bricks and shattered glass was another version of what Susannah knew as the Drawers and the place he had seen at the end of his vision in the place of bones.

As he told this part of his story for the second time, speaking very slowly now, Jake found that what the gunslinger had said was true: he
could
remember everything. His recall improved until he almost seemed to be reliving the experience. He told them of the sign which said that a building called Turtle Bay Condominiums was slated to stand on the spot where Tom and Gerry’s had once stood. He even remembered the little poem which had been spray-painted on the fence, and recited it for them:

Susannah murmured, “His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind . . . isn’t that how it went, Roland?”

“What?” Jake asked. “How what went?”

“A poem I learned as a child,” Roland said. “It’s another connection, one that really tells us something, although I’m not sure it’s anything we need to know . . . still, one never knows when a little understanding may come in handy.”

“Twelve portals connected by six Beams,” Eddie said. “We started at the Bear. We’re only going as far as the middle—to the Tower—but if we went all the way to the other end, we’d come to the Portal of the Turtle, wouldn’t we?”

Roland nodded. “I’m sure we would.”

“Portat of the Turtle,” Jake said thoughtfully, rolling the words in his mouth, seeming to taste them. Then he finished by telling them again about the gorgeous voice of the choir, his realization that there were faces and stories and histories everywhere, and his growing belief that he had stumbled on something very like the core of all existence. Last of all, he told them again about finding the key and seeing the rose. In the totality of his recall, Jake began to weep, although he seemed unaware of it.

“When it opened,” he said, “I saw the middle was the brightest yellow you ever saw in your life. At first I thought it was pollen and it only looked bright because
everything
in that lot looked bright. Even looking at the old candy-wrappers and beer-bottles was like looking at the greatest paintings you ever saw. Only then I realized it was a sun. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it was. Only it was more than one. It was—”

“It was
all
suns,” Roland murmured. “It was everything
real
.”

“Yes! And it was
right
—but it was
wrong
, too. I can’t explain
how
it was wrong, but it was. It was like two heartbeats, one inside of the other, and the one inside had a disease. Or an infection. And then I fainted.”

“You SAW THE SAME thing at the end of your dream, Roland, didn’t you?” Susannah asked. Her voice was soft with awe. “The blade of grass you saw near the end of it . . . you thought that blade was purple because it was splattered with paint.”

“You don’t understand,” Jake said. “It really
was
purple. When I was seeing it the way it really was, it was
purple
. Like no grass I ever saw before. The paint was just camouflage. The way the doorkeeper camouflaged itself to look like an old deserted house.”

The sun had reached the horizon. Roland asked Jake if he would now show them
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and then read it to them. Jake handed the book around. Both Eddie and Susannah looked at the cover for a long time.

“I had this book when I was a little kid,” Eddie said at last. He spoke in the flat tones of utter surety. “Then we moved from Queens to Brooktyn—I wasn’t even four years old—and I lost it. But I remember the picture on the cover. And I felt the same way you do, Jake. I didn’t like it. I didn’t trust it.”

Susannah raised her eyes to look at Eddie. “I had it, too—how could I ever forget the little girl with my name . . . although of course it was my middle name back in those days. And I felt the same way about the train. I didn’t like it and I didn’t trust it.” She tapped the front of the book with her finger before passing it on to Roland. “I thought that smile was a great big fake.”

Roland gave it only a cursory glance before returning his eyes to Susannah. “Did you lose yours, too?”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll bet I know when,” Eddie said.

Susannah nodded. “I’ll bet you do. It was after that man dropped the brick on my head. I had it when we went north to my Aunt Blue’s wedding. I had it on the train. I remember, because I kept asking my dad if Charlie the Choo-Choo was pulling us. I didn’t want it to be Charlie, because we were supposed to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I thought Charlie might take us anywhere. Didn’t he end up pulling folks around a toy village or something like that, Jake?”

“An amusement park.”

“Yes, of course it was. There’s a picture of him hauling kids around that place at the end, isn’t there? They’re all smiling and laughing, except I always thought they looked like they were screaming to be let off.”

“Yes!” Jake cried. “Yes, that’s right! That’s
just
right!”

“I thought Charlie might take us to
his
place-wherever he lived—instead of to my aunt’s wedding, and never let us go home again.”

“You can’t go home again,” Eddie muttered, and ran his hands nervously through his hair.

“All the time we were on that train I wouldn’t let go of the book. I even remember thinking, ’If he tries to steal us, I’ll rip out his pages until he quits.’ But of course we arrived right where we were supposed to, and on time, too. Daddy even took me up front, so I could see the engine. It was a diesel, not a steam engine, and I remember that made me happy. Then, after the wedding, that man Mort dropped the brick on me and I was in a coma for a long time. I never saw
Charlie the Choo-Choo
after that. Not until now.” She hesitated, then added: “This could be my copy, for all I know—or Eddie’s.”

“Yeah, and probably is,” Eddie said. His face was pale and solemn . . . and then he grinned like a kid. “ ‘See the TURTLE, ain’t he keen? All things serve the fuckin Beam.’ ”

Roland glanced west. “The sun’s going down. Read the story before we lose the light, Jake.”

Jake turned to the first page, showed them the picture of Engineer Bob in Charlie’s cab, and began: “‘Bob Brooks was an engineer for The Mid-World Railway Company, on the St. Louis to Topeka run . . .’ ”

“ ‘. . . AND EVERY Now AND then the children hear him singing his old song in his soft, gruff voice,’ ” Jake finished. He showed them the last picture-the happy children who might actually have been screaming-and then closed the book. The sun had gone down; the sky was purple.

“Well, it’s not a
perfect
fit,” Eddie said, “more like a dream where the water sometimes runs uphill—but it fits well enough to scare
me
silly. This is Mid-World—Charlie’s territory. Only his name over here isn’t Charlie at all. Over here it’s Blaine the Mono.”

Roland was looking at Jake. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we go around the city? Stay away from this train?”

Jake thought it over, head down, hands working distractedly through Oy’s thick, silky fur. “I’d like to,” he said at last, “but if I’ve got this stuff about
ka
right, I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

Roland nodded. “If it’s
ka
, questions of what we’re supposed to or not supposed to do aren’t even in it; if we tried to go around, we’d find circumstances forcing us back. In such cases it’s better to give in to the inevitable promptly instead of putting it off. What do you think, Eddie?”

Eddie thought as long and as carefully as Jake had done. He didn’t want anything to do with a talking train that ran by itself, and whether you called it Charlie the Choo-Choo or Blaine the Mono, everything Jake had told them and read them suggested that it might be a very nasty piece of work. But they had a tremendous distance to cross, and somewhere, at the end of it, was the thing they had come to find. And with that thought, Eddie was amazed to discover he knew exactly what he thought, and what he wanted. He raised his head and for almost the first time since he had come to this world, he fixed Roland’s faded blue eyes firmly with his hazel ones.