He's always careful about walking on the shoulder of the public road, though traffic is light on Route 7, even in summer; the only time this highway ever gets busy is when the Fryeburg Fair's going on, and that doesn't start until the first week of October. Most of the sightlines are good, anyway. If a bad driver's coming (or a drunk) you can usually spot him half a mile away, which gives you plenty of time to vacate the area. There's only one blind hill, and that's the one directly beyond the Warrington's intersection. Yet that's also an aerobic hill, one that gets the old heart really pumping, and isn't that what he's doing all these stupid walks for"? To promote what the TV talking heads call "heart healthiness?" He's quit drinking, he's quit doping, he's almost quit smoking, he exercises. What else is there?
Yet a voice whispers to him just the same. Get off the main road, it says. Go on back to the house. You'll have an extra hour before you have to meet the rest of them for the party on the other side of the lake. You can do some work. Maybe start the next Dark Tower story; you know it's been on your mind.
Aye, so it has, but he already has a story to work on, and he likes it fine. Going back to the tale of the Tower means swimming in deep water.
Maybe drowning there. Yet he suddenly realizes, standing here at this crossroads, that if he goes back early he will begin. He won't be able to help himself. He'll have to listen to what he sometimes thinks of as Ves'-
Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle (and sometimes as Susannah's Song).
He'll junk the current story, turn his back on the safety of the land, and swim out into that dark water once again. He's done it four times before, but this time he'll have to swim all the way to the other side.
Sioim or drown.
"No, "he says. He speaks aloud, and why not? There's no one to hear him out here. He perceives, faintly, the attenuate sound of an approaching vehicle-or is it two? one on Route 7 and one on Warrington's Road?-but that's all.
"No," he says again. "I'm gonna walk, and then I'm gonna party.
No more writing today. Especially not that."
And so, leaving the intersection behind, he begins making his way up the steep hill with its short sightline. He begins to walk toward the sound of the oncoming Dodge Caravan, which is also the sound of his oncoming death. The ka of the rational world wants him dead; that of the Prim wants him alive, and singing his song. So it is that on this sunny afternoon in luestern Maine, the irresistible force rushes toward the immovable object, and for the first time since the Prim receded, all worlds and all existence turn toward the Dark Tower which stands at the far end of Can '-Ka No Rey, which is to say the Red Fields of None.
Even the Crimson King ceases his angry screaming. For it is the Dark Tower that will decide.
"Resolution demands a sacrifice, "King says, and although no one hears but the birds and he has no idea what this means, he is not disturbed.
He's always muttering to himself; it's as though there is a Cave of Voices in his head, one full of brilliant-but not necessarily intelligent-mimics.
He walks, swinging his arms beside his bluejeaned thighs, unaware that his heart is
(isn't)
finishing its last few beats, that his mind is
(isn't)
thinking its last few thoughts, that his voices an
(aren't)
making their last Delphic pronouncements.
"Ves'-Ka Gan," he says, amused by the sound of it-yet attracted, too. He has promised himself that he'll try not to stuff his Dark Tower fantasies with unpronounceable words in some made-up (not to say f**ked-up) language-his editor, Chuck Verrill in New York, will only cut most of them if he does-but his mind seems to be filling up with such words and phrases all the same: ka, ka-tet, sai, soh, can-toi
(that one at least is from another book of his, Desperation), taheen.
Can Tolkien's Cirith Ungol and H. P. Lovecraft's Great Blind Fiddler,
Nyarlahotep, be far behind1?
He laughs, then begins to sing a song one of his voices has given him. He thinks he will certainly use it in the next gunslinger book, when he finally allows the Turtle its voice again. "Commala-come-one,"
he sings as he walks, "there's a young man with a gun. That young man lost his honey when she took it on the run."
And is that young man Eddie Dean? Or is it Jake Chambers?
"Eddie," he says out loud. "Eddie's the gunny with the honey." He's so deep in thought that at first he doesn't see the roof of the blue Dodge Caravan as it comes over the short horizon ahead of him and so does not realize this vehicle is not on the highway at all, but on the soft shoulder where he is walking. Nor does he hear the oncoming roar of the pickup truck behind him...
EIGHTEEN
Bryan hears the scrape of the cooler's lid even over the funky rip-rap beat of the music, and when he looks in the rearview mirror he's both dismayed and outraged to see that Bullet, always the more forward of the two rotties, has leaped from the storage area at the rear of the van into the passenger compartment. Bullet's rear legs are up on the dirty seat, his stubby tail is wagging happily, and his nose is buried in Bryan's cooler.