SIX
“Has to be cash,” Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.
“Huh?” Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.
“Cash,” Jake repeated. “No one’d honor a check, even a cashier’s check, that was thirteen years old. Especially not one for millions of dollars.”
“How do you know stuff like that, sug?” Susannah asked.
Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn’t), he was Elmer Chambers’s son. Elmer Chambers wasn’t one of the world’s good guys—Roland would never call him part of the White—but he had been a master of what network execs called “the kill.” A Big Coffin Hunter in TV Land, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn’t forgotten the face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn’t so.
“Cash, by all means cash,” Eddie said, breaking the silence. “A deal like this has to be cash. If there’s a check, we cash it in 1964, not 1977. Stick it in a gym-bag—did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977. Doesn’t have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close.”
“And it can’t be after July fifteenth of ’77,” Jake put in.
“God, no,” Eddie agreed. “We’d be all too likely to find Balazar’d persuaded Tower to sell, and there we’d be, bag of cash in one hand, thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of day.”
There was a moment of silence—perhaps they were considering this lurid image—and then Roland said, “You make it sound very easy, and why not? To you three, the concept of doorways between this world and your world of tack-sees and astin and fottergrafs seems almost as mundane as riding a mule would to me. Or strapping on a sixgun. And there’s good reason for you to feel that way. Each of you has been through one of these doors. Eddie has actually gone both ways—into this world and then back into his own.”
“I gotta tell you that the return trip to New York wasn’t much fun,” Eddie said. “Too much gunplay.” Not to mention my brother’s severed head rolling across the floor of Balazar’s office.
“Neither was getting through the door on Dutch Hill,” Jake added.
Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own. “All my life I’ve accepted what you said the first time I knew you, Jake—what you said when you were dying.”
Jake looked down, pale and without answer. He did not like to recall that (it was mercifully hazy in any case), and knew that Roland didn’t, either. Good! he thought. You shouldn’t want to remember! You let me drop! You let me die!
“You said there were other worlds than these,” Roland said, “and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or—”
“Or it’s another door,” Susannah murmured. “One that opens on the Dark Tower itself.”
Roland nodded. “The idea has done more than cross my mind. In any case, the Manni know of these other worlds, and in some fashion have dedicated their lives to them. They believe todash to be the holiest of rites and most exalted of states. My father and his friends have long known of the glass balls; this I have told you. That the Wizard’s Rainbow, todash, and these magical doors may all be much the same is something we have guessed.”
“Where you going with this, sug?” Susannah asked.
“I’m simply reminding you that I have wandered long,” Roland said. “Because of changes in time—a softening of time which I know you all have felt—I’ve quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had no idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o’ the rainbow.”
Roland looked at them earnestly.
“You speak as though my world were as filled with magical doorways as yours is with . . . ” He thought about it. “ . . . with airplanes or stage-buses. That’s not so.”
“Where we are now isn’t the same as anywhere you’ve been before, Roland,” Susannah said. She touched his deeply tanned wrist, her fingers gentle. “We’re not in your world anymore. You said so yourself, back in that version of Topeka where Blaine finally blew his top.”
“Agreed,” Roland said. “I only want you to realize that such doors may be far more rare than you realize. And now you’re speaking not of one but two. Doors you can aim in time, the way you’d aim a gun.”
I do not aim with my hand, Eddie thought, and shivered a little. “When you put it that way, Roland, it does sound a little iffy.”
“Then what do we do next?” Jake asked.
“I might be able to help you with that,” a voice said.
They all turned, only Roland without surprise. He had heard the stranger when he arrived, about halfway through their palaver. Roland did turn with interest, however, and one look at the man standing twenty feet from them on the edge of the road was enough to tell him that the newcomer was either from the world of his new friends, or from one right next door.
“Who are you?” Eddie asked.
“Where are your friends?” Susannah asked.
“Where are you from?” Jake asked. His eyes were alight with eagerness.
The stranger wore a long black coat open over a dark shirt with a notched collar. His hair was long and white, sticking up on the sides and in front as if scared. His forehead was marked with a T-shaped scar. “My friends are still back there a little piece,” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the woods in a deliberately nonspecific way. “I now call Calla Bryn Sturgis my home. Before that, Detroit, Michigan, where I worked in a homeless shelter, making soup and running AA meetings. Work I knew quite well. Before that—for a short while—Topeka, Kansas.”
He observed the way the three younger ones started at that with a kind of interested amusement.
“Before that, New York City. And before that, a little town called Jerusalem’s Lot, in the state of Maine.”
SEVEN
“You’re from our side,” Eddie said. He spoke in a kind of sigh. “Holy God, you’re really from our side!”
“Yes, I think I am,” the man in the turned-around collar said. “My name is Donald Callahan.”
“You’re a priest,” Susannah said. She looked from the cross that hung around his neck—small and discreet, but gleaming gold—to the larger, cruder one that scarred his forehead.
Callahan shook his head. “No more. Once. Perhaps one day again, with the blessing, but not now. Now I’m just a man of God. May I ask . . . when are you from?”
“1964,” Susannah said.
“1977,” Jake said.
“1987,” Eddie said.
Callahan’s eyes gleamed at that. “1987. And I came here in 1983, counting as we did then. So tell me something, young man, something very important. Had the Red Sox won the World Series yet when you left?”
Eddie threw back his head and laughed. The sound was both surprised and cheerful. “No, man, sorry. They came within one out of it last year—at Shea Stadium this was, against the Mets—and then this guy named Bill Buckner who was playing first base let an easy grounder get through his wickets. He’ll never live it down. Come on over here and sit down, what do you say? There’s no coffee, but Roland—that’s this beat-up-lookin guy on my right—makes a pretty fair cup of woods tea.”
Callahan turned his attention to Roland and then did an amazing thing: dropped to one knee, lowered his head slightly, and put his fist against his scarred brow. “Hile, gunslinger, may we be well-met on the path.”
“Hile,” Roland said. “Come forward, good stranger, and tell us of your need.”
Callahan looked up at him, surprised.
Roland looked back at him calmly, and nodded. “Well-met or ill, it may be you will find what you seek.”
“And you may also,” Callahan said.
“Then come forward,” Roland said. “Come forward and join our palaver.”