Stephen King - The Dark Tower

Eddie tried to think of another question and couldn’t. That last answer pretty well covered the waterfront, and when Susannah called them back inside, he was more than glad to go.

Sheemie Ruiz had rediscovered his appetite, which all of them took as a good sign, and was tucking in happily. The bloodspots in his eyes had faded somewhat, but were still clearly visible. Eddie wondered what the guards back in Blue Heaven would make of those if they noticed them, and also wondered if Sheemie could wear a pair of sunglasses without exciting comment.

Roland had gotten the Rod to his feet and was now conferring with him at the back of the cave. Well…sort of. The gunslinger was talking and the Rod was listening, occasionally sneaking tiny awed peeks at Roland’s face. It was gibberish to Eddie, but he was able to pick out two words: Chevin and Chayven. Roland was asking this one about the one they’d met staggering along the road in Lovell.

“Does he have a name?” Eddie asked Dink and Ted, taking a second plate of food.

“I call him Chucky,” Dinky said. “Because he looks a little bit like the doll in this horror movie I saw once.”

Eddie grinned. “Child’s Play, yeah. I saw that one. After your when, Jake. And way after yours, Suziella.” The Rod’s hair wasn’t right, but the chubby, freckled cheeks and the blue eyes were. “Do you think he can keep a secret?”

“If no one asks him, he can,” Ted said. Which was not, in Eddie’s view, a very satisfactory answer.

After five minutes or so of chat, Roland seemed satisfied and rejoined the others. He hunkered — no problem doing that now that his joints had limbered up — and looked at Ted. “This fellow’s name is Haylis of Chayven. Will anyone miss him?”

“Unlikely,” Ted said. “The Rods show up at the gate beyond the dorms in little groups, looking for work. Fetching and carrying, mostly. They’re given a meal or something to drink as pay. If they don’t show up, no one misses them.”

“Good. Now — how long are the days here? Is it twenty-four hours from now until tomorrow morning at this time?”

Ted seemed interested in the question and considered it for several moments before replying. “Call it twenty-five,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. Because time is slowing down, at least here. As the Beams weaken, there seems to be a growing disparity in the time-flow between the worlds. It’s probably one of the major stress points.”

Roland nodded. Susannah offered him food and he shook his head with a word of thanks. Behind them, the Rod was sitting on a crate, looking down at his bare and sore-covered feet. Eddie was surprised to see Oy approach the fellow, and more surprised still when the bumbler allowed Chucky (or Haylis) to stroke his head with one misshapen claw of a hand.

“And is there a time of morning when things down there might be a little less…I don’t know…”

“A little disorganized?” Ted suggested.

Roland nodded.

“Did you hear a horn a little while ago?” Ted asked. “Just before we showed up?”

They all shook their heads.

Ted didn’t seem surprised. “But you heard the music start, correct?”

“Yes,” Susannah said, and offered Ted a fresh can of Nozz-A-La. He took it and drank with gusto. Eddie tried not to shudder.

“Thank you, ma’am. In any case, the horn signals the change of shifts. The music starts then.”

“I hate that music,” Dinky said moodily.

“If there’s any time when control wavers,” Ted went on, “that would be it.”

“And what o’clock is that?” Roland asked.

Ted and Dinky exchanged a doubtful glance. Dinky showed eight fingers, his eyebrows raised questioningly. He looked relieved when Ted nodded at once.

“Yes, eight o’clock,” Ted said, then laughed and gave his head a cynical little shake. “What would be eight, anyway, in a world where yon prison might always lie firmly east and not east by southeast on some days and dead east on others.”

But Roland had been living with the dissolving world long before Ted Brautigan had even dreamed of such a place as Algul Siento, and he wasn’t particularly upset by the way formerly hard-and-fast facts of life had begun to bend. “About twenty-five hours from right now,” Roland said. “Or a little less.”

Dinky nodded. “But if you’re counting on raging confusion, forget it. They know their places and go to them. They’re old hands.”

“Still,” Roland said, “it’s the best we’re apt to do.” Now he looked at his old acquaintance from Mejis. And beckoned to him.

Sheemie set his plate down at once, came to Roland, and made a fist. “Hile, Roland, Will Dearborn that was.”

Roland returned this greeting, then turned to Jake. The boy gave him an uncertain look. Roland nodded at him, and Jake came. Now Jake and Sheemie stood facing each other with Roland hunkered between them, seeming to look at neither now that they were brought together.

Jake raised a hand to his forehead.

Sheemie returned the gesture.

Jake looked down at Roland and said, “What do you want?”

Roland didn’t answer, only continued to look serenely toward the mouth of the cave, as if there were something in the apparently endless murk out there which interested him. And Jake knew what was wanted, as surely as if he had used the touch on Roland’s mind to find out (which he most certainly had not). They had come to a fork in the road. It had been Jake who’d suggested Sheemie should be the one to tell them which branch to take. At the time it had seemed like a weirdly good idea — who knew why. Now, looking into that earnest, not-very-bright face and those bloodshot eyes, Jake wondered two things: what had ever possessed him to suggest such a course of action, and why someone — probably Eddie, who retained a relatively hard head in spite of all they’d been through — hadn’t told him, kindly but firmly, that putting their future in Sheemie Ruiz’s hands was a dumb idea. Totally noodgy, as his old schoolmates back at Piper might have said. Now Roland, who believed that even in the shadow of death there were still lessons to be learned, wanted Jake to ask the question Jake himself had proposed, and the answer would no doubt expose him as the superstitious scatterbrain he had become. Yet still, why not ask? Even if it were the equivalent of flipping a coin, why not? Jake had come, possibly at the end of a short but undeniably interesting life, to a place where there were magic doors, mechanical butlers, telepathy (of which he was capable, at least to some small degree, himself), vampires, and were-spiders. So why not let Sheemie choose? They had to go one way or the other, after all, and he’d been through too goddam much to worry about such a paltry thing as looking like an idiot in front of his companions. Besides, he thought, if I’m not among friends here, I never will be .

“Sheemie,” he said. Looking into those bloody eyes was sort of horrible, but he made himself do it. “We’re on a quest. That means we have a job to do. We—”

“You have to save the Tower,” said Sheemie. “And my old friend is to go in, and mount to the top, and see what’s to see. There may be renewal, there may be death, or there may be both. He was Will Dearborn once, aye, so he was. Will Dearborn to me.”

Jake glanced at Roland, who was still hunkered down, looking out of the cave. But Jake thought his face had gone pale and strange.

One of Roland’s fingers made his twirling go-ahead gesture.

“Yes, we’re supposed to save the Dark Tower,” Jake agreed. And thought he understood some of Roland’s lust to see it and enter it, even if it killed him. What lay at the center of the universe? What man (or boy) could but wonder, once the question was thought of, and want to see?