Song of Susannah (36 page)

Rev. Harrigan paused in his labors long enough to watch a black woman—one fine-struttin honey, too, praise God—get into a cab. The cab drove off. He had a lot to do before beginning his nightly sermon—his little dance with Officer Benzyck was only the opening gun—but he stood there watching the cab’s taillights twinkle and dwindle, just the same.

Had something just happened to him?

Had . . . ? Was it possible that . . . ?

Rev. Harrigan fell to his knees on the sidewalk, quite oblivious of the pedestrians passing by (just as most were oblivious of him). He clasped his big old praise-God hands and raised them to his chin. He knew the Bible said that praying was a private thing best done in one’s closet, and he’d spent plenty of time getting kneebound in his own, yes Lord, but he also believed God wanted folks to see what a praying man looked like from time to time, because most of them—say
Gawd!
—had forgotten what that looked like. And there was no better, no
nicer
place to speak with God than right here on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth. There was a singing here, clean and sweet. It uplifted the spirit, clarified the mind . . . and, just incidentally, clarified the skin, as well. This wasn’t the voice of God, and Rev. Harrigan was not so blasphemously stupid as to think it was, but he had an idea that it was angels. Yes, say
Gawd
, say
Gawd-bomb
, the voice of the ser-a-phim!

“God, did you just drop a little God-bomb on
me? I want to ask was that voice I just heard yours or mine own?”

No answer. So many times there was no answer. He would ponder this. In the meantime, he had a sermon to prepare for. A show to do, if you wanted to be perfectly vulgar about it.

Rev. Harrigan went to his van, parked at the yellow curb as always, and opened the back doors. Then he took out the pamphlets, the silk-covered collection plate which he’d put beside him on the sidewalk, and the sturdy wooden cube. The soapbox upon which he would stand, could you raise up high and shout hallelujah?

And yes, brother, while you were right at it, could you give amen?

STAVE:
Commala-come-ken

It’s the other one again.

You may know her name and face

But that don’t make her your friend.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-ten!

She is not your friend!

If you let her get too close

She’ll cut you up again.

By the time they reached the little shopping center in the town of Bridgton—a supermarket, a laundry, and a surprisingly large drugstore—both Roland and Eddie sensed it: not just the singing, but the gathering power. It lifted them up like some crazy, wonderful elevator. Eddie found himself thinking of Tinkerbell’s magic dust and Dumbo’s magic feather. This was like drawing near the rose and yet not like that. There was no sense of holiness or sanctification in this little New England town, but
something
was going on here, and it was powerful.

Driving here from East Stoneham, following the signs to Bridgton from back road to back road, Eddie had sensed something else, as well: the unbelievable
crispness
of this world. The summer-green depths of the pine forests had a validity he had never encountered before, never even suspected. The birds which flew across the sky fair stopped his breath for wonder, even the most common sparrow. The very shadows on the ground seemed to have a velvety thickness, as if you could reach down, pick them up, and carry them away under your arm like pieces of carpet, if you so chose.

At some point, Eddie asked Roland if he felt any of this.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I feel it, see it, hear it . . . Eddie, I
touch
it.”

Eddie nodded. He did, too. This world was real beyond reality. It was . . .
anti
-todash. That was the best he could do. And they were very much in the heart of the Beam. Eddie could feel it carrying them on like a river rushing down a gorge toward a waterfall.

“But I’m afraid,” Roland said. “I feel as though we’re approaching the center of everything—the Tower itself, mayhap. It’s as if, after all these years, the quest itself has become the point for me, and the end is frightening.”

Eddie nodded. He could get behind that. Certainly he was afraid. If it wasn’t the Tower putting out that stupendous force, then it was some potent and terrible thing akin to the rose. But not quite the same. A
twin
to the rose? That could be right.

Roland looked out at the parking lot and the people who came and went beneath a summer sky filled with fat, slow-floating clouds, seemingly unaware that the whole world was singing with power around them, and that all the clouds flowed along the same ancient pathway in the heavens. They were unaware of their own beauty.

The gunslinger said, “I used to think the most terrible thing would be to reach the Dark Tower and find the top room empty. The God of all universes either dead or nonexistent in the first place. But now . . . suppose there
is
someone there, Eddie? Someone in charge who turns out to be . . .” He couldn’t finish.

Eddie could. “Someone who turns out to be just another bumhug? Is that it? God not dead but feeble-minded and malicious?”

Roland nodded. This was not, in fact, precisely what he was afraid of, but he thought Eddie had at least come close.

“How can that be, Roland? Considering what we feel?”

Roland shrugged, as if to say anything could be.

“In any case, what choice do we have?”

“None,” Roland said bleakly. “All things serve the Beam.”

Whatever the great and singing force was, it seemed to be coming from the road that ran west from the shopping center, back into the woods. Kansas Road, according to the sign, and that made Eddie think of Dorothy and Toto and Blaine the Mono.

He dropped the transmission of their borrowed Ford into Drive and started rolling forward. His heart was beating in his chest with slow, exclamatory force. He wondered if Moses had felt like this when he approached the burning bush which contained God. He wondered if Jacob had felt like this, awakening to find a stranger, both radiant and fair, in his camp—the angel with whom he would wrestle. He thought that they probably had. He felt sure that another part of their journey was about to come to an end—another answer lay up ahead.

God living on Kansas Road, in the town of Bridgton, Maine? It should have sounded crazy, but didn’t.

Just don’t strike me dead
, Eddie thought, and turned west.
I need to get back to my sweetheart
,
so please don’t strike me dead, whoever or whatever you are.

“Man, I’m so scared,” he said.

Roland reached out and briefly grasped his hand.

Three miles from the shopping center, they came to a dirt road which struck off into the pine trees on their left. There had been other byways, which Eddie had passed without slowing from the steady thirty miles an hour he had been maintaining, but at this one he stopped.

Both front windows were down. They could hear the wind in the trees, the grouchy call of a crow, the not-too-distant buzz of a powerboat, and the rumble of the Ford’s engine. Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds. The sign marking the turnoff said no more than
PRIVATE DRIVE
. Nevertheless, Eddie was nodding.

“This is it.”

“Yes, I know. How’s your leg?”

“Hurts. Don’t worry about it. Are we gonna do this?”

“We
have
to,” Roland said. “You were right to bring us here. What’s here is the other half of
this.
” He tapped the paper in his pocket, the one conveying ownership of the vacant lot to the Tet Corporation.

“You think this guy King is the rose’s twin.”

“You say true.” Roland smiled at his own choice
of words. Eddie thought he’d rarely seen one so sad. “We’ve picked up the Calla way of talking, haven’t we? Jake first, then all of us. But that will fall away.”

“Further to go,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.

“Aye, and it will be dangerous. Still . . . maybe nothing so dangerous as this. Shall we roll?”

“In a minute. Roland, do you remember Susannah mentioning a man named Moses Carver?”

“A stem . . . which is to say a man of affairs. He took over her father’s business when sai Holmes died, am I correct?”

“Yeah. He was also Suze’s godfather. She said he could be trusted completely. Remember how mad she got at Jake and me when we suggested he might have stolen the company’s money?”

Roland nodded.

“I trust her judgment,” Eddie said. “What about you?”

“Yes.”

“If Carver
is
honest, we might be able to put him in charge of the things we need to accomplish in this world.”

None of this seemed terribly important compared to the force Eddie felt rising all around him, but he thought it was. They might only have one chance to protect the rose now and ensure its survival later. They had to do it right, and Eddie knew that meant heeding the will of destiny.

In a word, ka.

“Suze says Holmes Dental was worth eight or ten million when you snatched her out of New
York, Roland. If Carver’s as good as I hope he is, the company might be worth twelve or fourteen million by now.”

“That’s a lot?”

“Delah,” Eddie said, tossing his open hand at the horizon, and Roland nodded. “It sounds funny to talk about using the profits from some kind of dental process to save the universe, but that’s just what I
am
talking about. And the money the tooth-fairy left her may only be the beginning. Microsoft, for instance. Remember me mentioning that name to Tower?”

Roland nodded. “Slow down, Eddie.
Calm
down, I beg.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and pulled in a deep breath. “It’s this place. The singing. The
faces
. . . do you see the faces in the trees? In the shadows?”

“I see them very well.”

“It makes me feel a little crazy. Bear with me. What I’m talking about is merging Holmes Dental and the Tet Corporation, then using our knowledge of the future to turn it into one of the richest combinations in the history of the world. Resources to equal those of the Sombra Corporation . . . or maybe North Central Positronics itself.”

Roland shrugged, then lifted a hand as if to ask how Eddie could talk about money while in the presence of the immense force flowing along the barrel of the Beam and through them, lifting the hair from the napes of their necks, making their sinuses tingle, turning every woodsy shadow into a watching face . . . as if a multitude had gathered here
to watch them play out a crucial scene in their drama.

“I know how you feel, but it
matters
,” Eddie insisted. “Believe me, it does. Suppose, for instance, we were to grow fast enough to buy out North Central Positronics before it can rise as a force in this world? Roland, we might be able to turn it, the way you can turn even the biggest river with no more than a single spade up in its headwaters, where it’s only a trickle.”

At this Roland’s eyes gleamed. “Take it over,” he said. “Turn its purpose from the Crimson King’s to our own. Yes, that might be possible.”

“Whether it is or isn’t, we have to remember that we’re not just playing for 1977, or 1987, where I came from, or 1999, where Suze went.” In that world, Eddie realized, Calvin Tower might be dead and Aaron Deepneau would be for sure, their final action in the Dark Tower’s drama—saving Donald Callahan from the Hitler Brothers—long finished. Swept from the stage, both of them. Into the clearing at the end of the path along with Gasher and Hoots, Benny Slightman, Susan Delgado

(
Calla, Callahan, Susan, Susannah
)

and the Tick-Tock Man, even Blaine and Patricia. Roland and his ka-tet would also pass into that clearing, be it early or late. In the end—if they were fantastically lucky and suicidally brave—only the Dark Tower would stand. If they could nip North Central Positronics in the bud, they might be able to save all the Beams that had been broken. Even if they failed at that, two Beams might be
enough to hold the Tower in place: the rose in New York and a man named Stephen King in Maine. Eddie’s head had no proof that this was indeed the case . . . but his heart believed it.