Stephen King: The Dark Tower

The hawk-headed taheen looked up, perhaps following her gaze, perhaps hearing the chimes with its preternaturally sharp ears. Then the doctor lowered his forceps and thrust them beneath Mia’s gown. She shrieked. Susannah shrieked with her. And as if Roland’s essentially bodiless being could be pushed away by the force of those combined screams like a milkweed pod lifted and carried on a gust of October wind, the gunslinger felt himself rise violently, losing touch with this place as he went, but holding onto that one word. It brought with it a brilliant memory of his mother leaning over him as he lay in bed. In the room of many colors, this had been, the nursery, and of course now he understood the colors he’d only accepted as a young boy, accepted as children barely out of their clouts accept everything: with unquestioning wonder, with the unspoken assumption that it’s all magic.

The windows of the nursery had been stained glass representing the Bends o’ the Rainbow, of course. He remembered his mother leaning toward him, her face pied with that lovely various light, her hood thrown back so he could trace the curve of her neck with the eye of a child ( it’s all magic ) and the soul of a lover; he remembered thinking how he would court her and win her from his father, if she would have him; how they would marry and have children of their own and live forever in that fairy-tale kingdom called the All-A-Glow; and how she sang to him, how Gabrielle Deschain sang to her little boy with his big eyes looking solemnly up at her from his pillow and his face already stamped with the many swimming colors of his wandering life, singing a lilting nonsense song that went like this: Baby-bunting, baby-dear,Baby, bring your berries here.Chussit, chissit, chassit!Bring enough to fill your basket!

Enough to fill my basket, he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren’t quite nonsense but old numbers, she’d told him once when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit : seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Of course, it’s all nineteen . Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake’s left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.

Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my basket. But what basket? What does it mean?

Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum’s twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer and she was just getting wa’amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazily back and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with the car’s motion like corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debris which collects in any old car that’s been hard-used: the ashes and pens and paperclips and the world’s oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat and pine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door.

Someone passing would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff — and people! people who might be dead! — floating around in the car like jetsam in a space capsule. But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lake were mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even though there was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke was almost gone.

Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him. Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways motion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek.

Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as well. That was why she’d labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of them. The boy and the Pere had entered the Dixie Pig, a thing that was either very brave or very foolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on what they’d found there.

Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had come ready to fight. Callahan was holding Jake’s gun…and another thing, as well: some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of the little gods. The boy had Susannah’s ’Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved from only the gods knew where.

The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanity ended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she’d been wearing hung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood a good many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not his attention — like that of the boy and the Pere at this very moment — been focused on other matters.

Callahan’s low men, for instance. They might well be taheen, creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two. They certainly weren’t the sort of beings Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen as a result of the old ones’ ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, they might be genuine taheen, sometimes known as the third people or the can-toi, and yes, Roland should have known. How many of the taheen now served the being known as the Crimson King? Some? Many?

All?

If the third answer was the correct one, Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger’s nature, and in this case his lack of imagination was surely a blessing.

He saw what he needed to see. Although the can-toi — Callahan’s low folk — had surrounded Jake and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn’t even seen the duo behind them, the ones who’d been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street), the Pere had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with the key he’d found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort to grab it.

Yet there was another problem, one Roland’s eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush, fixed upon at once. He saw the blasphemous parody of Eld’s Last Fellowship on the wall and understood its significance completely in the seconds before it was ripped away. And the smell: not just flesh but human flesh. This too he would have understood earlier, had he had time to think about it…only life in Calla Bryn Sturgis had allowed him little time to think. In the Calla, as in a storybook, life had been one damned thing after another.

Yet it was clear enough now, wasn’t it? The low folk might only be taheen; a child’s ogres, if it did ya. Those behind the tapestry were what Callahan had called Type One vampires and what Roland himself knew as the Grandfathers, perhaps the most gruesome and powerful survivors of the Prim ’s long-ago recession. And while such as the taheen might be content to stand as they were, gawking at the sigul Callahan held up, the Grandfathers wouldn’t spare it a second glance.