The Dark Tower

D.

PS: Something going on at thestore big enuf to rate 3 police cars. WALK-INS, maybe???? If you hear, fill me in.

She’d told him she was going to thestore this afternoon—eggs and milk that she’d of course nevergotten—and he had nodded. Yes dear, yes dear. But his note held nohint of worry, no sense that he even remembered what she’d said. Well, whatelse did she expect? When it came to David, info entered ear A, info exited earB. Welcome to GeniusWorld.

She turned the note over, plucked a penfrom a teacup filled with them, hesitated, then wrote:

David,

Something has happened, and Ihave to be gone for awhile. 2 days at least, I think maybe 3 or 4. Please don’tworry about me and don’t call anyone. ESPECIALLY NOT POLICE. It’sa stray cat thing.

Would he understand that? She thought hewould if he remembered how they’d met. At the Santa Monica ASPCA, that hadbeen, among the stacked rows of ke

She hesitated, then added

Love you,

Ree

Was that true any longer? Well, let itstand, either way. Crossing out what you’d written in ink always looked ugly.She put the note back on the fridge with the same magnet to hold it in place.

She got the keys to the Mercedes out of thebasket by the door, then remembered the rowboat, still tied up at the littlestub of dock behind the store. It would be all right there. But then shethought of something else, something the boy had told her. He doesn’t knowabout money.

She went into the pantry, where they alwayskept a slim roll of fifties (there were places out here in the boondocks whereshe would be willing to swear they’d never even heard of MasterCard) andtook three. She started away, shrugged, went back, and took the other three, aswell. Why not? She was living dangerously today.

On her way out, she paused again to look atthe note. And then, for absolutely no reason she could understand, she took thePositronics magnet away and replaced it with an orange slice. Then she left.

Never mind the future. For the time being,she had enough to keep her occupied in the present.

Nine

The emergency bucka was gone, bearing thewriter to the nearest hospital or infirmary, Roland assumed. Peace officers hadcome just as it left, and they spent perhaps half an hour talking with BryanSmith. The gunslinger could hear the palaver from where he was, just over thefirst rise. The bluebacks’ questions were clear and calm, Smith’s answerslittle more than mumbles. Roland saw no reason to stop working. If the bluescame back here and found him, he would deal with them. Just incapacitate them,unless they made that impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. Buthe would bury his dead, one way or another.

He would bury his dead.

The lovely green-gold light of the clearingdeepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was doing in orderto slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then lumber off, heavy withtheir freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-diggingthe grave, the smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith’svan-mobile. He had heard the voices of only two peace officers, which meantthat, unless there had been a third blueback with nothing to say, they wereallowing Smith to drive away by himself. Roland thought this rather odd,but—like the question of whether or not King was paralyzed—it wasnone of his matter or mind. All that mattered was this; all that mattered wasseeing to his own.

He made three trips to collect stones,because a grave dug by hand must necessarily be a shallow one and animals, evenin such a tame world as this, are always hungry. He stacked the stones at thehead of the hole, a scar lined with earth so rich it could have been blacksatin. Oy lay by Jake’s head, watching the gunslinger come and go, sayingnothing. He’d always been different from his kind as they were since the worldhad moved on; Roland had even speculated that it was Oy’s extraordinarychattiness that had caused the others in his tet to expel him, and not gently,either. When they’d come upon this fellow, not too far from the town of RiverCrossing, he’d been scrawny to the point of starvation, and with a half-healedbite-mark on one flank. The bumbler had loved Jake from the first: “That’s asclear as Earth needs,” Cort might have said (or Roland’s own father, for thatmatter). And it was to Jake the bumbler had talked the most. Roland had an ideathat Oy might fall mostly silent now that the boy was dead, and this thoughtwas another way of defining what was lost.

He remembered the boy standing before thepeople of Calla Bryn Sturgis in the torchlight, his face young and fair, as ifhe would live forever. I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld,the ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine, he had said, and oh, aye, for here hewas in the Ninety and Nine, with his grave all dug, clean and ready for him.

Roland began to weep again. He put hishands over his face and rocked back and forth on his knees, smelling the sweetaromatic needles and wishing he had cried off before ka, that old and patientdemon, had taught him the real price of his quest. He would have given anythingto change what had happened, anything to close this hole with nothing in it,but this was the world where time ran just one way.

Ten

When he had gained control of himselfagain, he wrapped Jake carefully in the blue tarpaulin, fashioning a kind ofhood around the still, pale face. He would close that face away for good beforerefilling the grave, but not until.

“Oy?” he asked. “Will you say goodbye?”

Oy looked at Roland, and for a moment thegunslinger wasn’t sure he understood. Then the bumbler extended his neck andcaressed the boy’s cheek a last time with his tongue. “I, Ake,” he said: Bye,Jake or I ache, it came to the same.

The gunslinger gathered the boy up (howlight he was, this boy who had jumped from the barn loft with Be