THIRTEEN
"Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has ever protected his life. They say his song has cast the circle," Trampas told me, "although no one seems to know exactly what that means." Now, however, ka-not the Red King but plain old ka-has decreed that this man, this guardian or whatever he is, should die.
He's stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was supposed to sing, he's stopped, and that has finally made him vulnerable. But not to the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it's ka he's vulnerable to. "He no longer sings," Trampas said. "His song, the one that matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose."
FOURTEEN
In the outer silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it.
FIFTEEN
"Trampas told me all this only so I'd understand I was no longer completely indispensable. Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor in bringing down Shardik 's Beam before this man's death could cause Gan 's Beam to break."
A pause.
"Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet..."
SIXTEEN
Roland, exasperated, twirled his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were listening could see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi guard knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some rambling, discursive sidetrack. It was understandable-the man was clearly exhausted-but there was something here more important than everything else. Eddie knew it, too. Roland could read it on the young man's strained face.
Together they watched the remaining brown tape-now no more than an eighth of an inch deep-melt away.
SEVENTEEN
"... yet we're only poor benighted humies, and I suppose we can't know about these things, not with any degree of certainty..."
He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at last:
"Iasked this magic man's name and Trampas said, 'Iknow it not,
Ted, but I do know there's no magic in him anymore, for he's ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do. If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of Ninety-nine, which is that of our world, will combine to-"
But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.
EIGHTEEN
The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making that low fwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressed STOP. He muttered "Fuck!" under his breath.
"Just when it was getting interesting," Jake said. "And those numbers again. Nineteen... and ninety-nine." He paused, then said them together. "Nineteen-ninety-nine." Then a third time. "1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to have her baby. Where Black Thirteen is now."
"Keystone World, Keystone Year," Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle, held it up to one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. "Where time always goes in one direction. Like it's s'posed to."
"Gan created time," Roland said. "This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the void-some tales say from the sea, but both surely mean the Prim-and made the world. Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling and that was time."
Something was gathering in the cave. Some revelation.
They all felt it, a thing as close to bursting as Mia's belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been haunted by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the sky, saw them written on board fences, heard them in their dreams.
Oy looked up, ears cocked, eyes bright.
Susannah said, "When Mia left the room we were in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie Pig-room 1919, it was-I fell into a kind of trance. I had dreams... jailhouse-dreams... newscasters announcing that this one, that one, and t'other one had died-"
"You told us," Eddie said.
She shook her head violently. "Not all of it, I didn't. Because some of it didn't seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that President Kennedy's little boy was dead, for instance-little John-John, the one who saluted his Daddy's coffin when the catafalque went by. I didn't tell you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had litde John-John Kennedy died in your whens? Either of your whens?"