“It’s so lovely,” Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun sank toward the horizon. “It’s the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were settled—even before the Indians came.” She raised her free hand and pointed toward the place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. “There’s your city,” she said. “Isn’t it?” “Yes.”
“It looks okay,” Eddie said. “Is that possible, Roland? Could it still be pretty much intact. Did the old-timers build that well?” “Anything is possible in these times,” Roland said, but he sounded doubtful. “You shouldn’t get your hopes up, though, Eddie.” “Huh? No.” But Eddie’s hopes were up. That dimly sketched skyline had awakened homesickness in Susannah’s heart; in Eddie’s it kindled a sudden blaze of supposition. If the city was still there—and it clearly was—it might still be populated, and maybe not just by the subhuman things Roland had met under the mountains, either. The city-dwellers might be (Americans, Eddie’s subconscious whispered) intelligent and helpful; they might, in fact, spell the difference between success and failure for the quest of the pilgrims … or even between life and death. In Eddie’s mind a vision (partly cribbed from movies like The Last Starfighter and The Dark Crystal) gleamed brightly: a council of gnarled but dignified City Elders who would serve them a whopping meal drawn from the unspoiled stores of the city (or perhaps from special gardens cradled within environmental bubbles) and who would, as he and Roland and Susannah ate themselves silly, explain exactly what lay ahead and what it all meant. Their parting gift to the wayfarers would be an AAA-approved Tour Guide map with the best route to the Dark Tower marked in red. Eddie did not know the phrase deus ex machina, but he knew—had now grown up enough to know—that such wise and kindly folk lived mostly in comic books and B-movies. The idea was intoxicating, all the same: an enclave of civilization in this dangerous, mostly empty world; wise old elf-men who would tell them just what the f**k it was they were supposed to be doing. And the fabulous shapes of the city disclosed in that hazy skyline made the idea seem at least possible. Even if the city was totally deserted, the population wiped out by some long-ago plague or outbreak of chemical warfare, it might still serve them as a kind of giant toolbox—a huge Army-Navy Surplus Store where they could outfit themselves for the hard passages Eddie was sure must lie ahead. Besides, he was a city boy, born and bred, and the sight of all those tall towers just naturally got him up. “All right!” he said, almost laughing out loud in his excitement. “Hey-ho, let’s go! Bring on those wise f**kin elves!”
Susannah looked at him, puzzled but smiling. “What you ravin about, white boy?” “Nothing. Never mind. I just want to get moving. What do you say, Roland? Want to—“
But something on Roland’s face or just beneath it—some lost, dreaming thing—caused him to fall silent and put one arm around Susan-nah’s shoulders, as if to protect her.
AFTER ONE BRIEF, DISMISSIVE glance at the city skyline, Roland’s gaze had been caught by something a good deal closer to their current posi-tion, something that filled him with disquiet and foreboding. He had seen such things before, and the last time he’d come across one, Jake had been with him. He remembered how they had finally come out of the desert, the trail of the man in black leading them through the foothills and toward the mountains. Hard going, it had been, but at least there had been water again. And grass. One night he had awakened to find Jake gone. He had heard stran-gled, desperate cries coming from a willow-grove hard by a narrow trickle of stream. By the time he had fought his way through to the clearing at the center of the grove, the boy’s cries had ceased. Roland had found him standing in a place exactly like the one which lay below and ahead. A place of stones; a place of sacrifice; a place where an Oracle lived . . . and spoke when it was forced to … and killed whenever it could.