The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)(56)
“Shut up,” Eddie muttered.
The gunslinger raised his eyebrows.
“Not you.”
Roland nodded, unsurprised. “Your brother comes to you often, doesn’t he, Eddie?”
For a moment Eddie only stared at him, his carving still hidden in the hide square. Then he smiled. It was not a very pleasant smile. “Not as often as he used to, Roland. Thank Christ for small favors.” “Yes,” Roland said. “Too many voices weigh heavy on a man’s heart . . . What is it, Eddie? Show me, please.”
Eddie held up the chunk of ash. The key, almost complete, emerged from it like the head of a woman from the prow of a sailing ship … or the hilt of a sword from a chunk of stone. Eddie didn’t know how close he had come to duplicating the key-shape he had seen in the fire (and never would, he supposed, unless he found the right lock in which to try it), but he thought it was close. Of one thing he was quite sure: it was the best carving he had ever done. By far. “By the gods, Eddie, it’s beautiful!” Roland said. The apathy was gone from his voice; he spoke in a tone of surprised reverence Eddie had never heard before. “Is it done? It’s not, is it?”
“No—not quite.” He ran his thumb into the third notch, and then over the s-shape at the end of the last notch. “There’s a little more to do on this notch, and the curve at the end isn’t right yet. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.” “This is your secret.” It wasn’t a question. “Yes. Now if only I knew what it meant.” Roland looked around. Eddie followed his gaze and saw Susannah. He found some relief in the fact that Roland had heard her first. “What you boys doin up so late? Chewin the fat?” She saw the wooden key in Eddie’s hand and nodded. “I wondered when you were going to get around to showing that off. It’s good, you know. I don’t know what it’s for, but it’s damned good.”
“You don’t have any idea what door it might open?” Roland asked Eddie. “That was not part of your khef?”
“No—but it might be good for something even though it isn’t done.” He held the key out to Roland. “I want you to keep it for me.” Roland didn’t move to take it. He regarded Eddie closely. “Why?” “Because . . . well. . . because I think someone told me you should.” “Who?”
Your boy, Eddie thought suddenly, and as soon as the thought came he knew it was true. It was your goddamned boy. But he didn’t want to say so. He didn’t want to mention the boy’s name at all. It might just set Roland off again.
“I don’t know. But I think you ought to give it a try.”
Roland reached slowly for the key. As his fingers touched it, a bright glimmer seemed to flash down its barrel, but it was gone so quickly that Eddie could not be sure he had seen it. It might have been only starlight. Roland’s hand closed over the key growing out of the branch. For a moment his face showed nothing. Then his brow furrowed and his head cocked in a listening gesture.
“What is it?” Susannah asked. “Do you hear—” “Shhhh!” The puzzlement on Roland’s face was slowly being replaced with wonder. He looked from Eddie to Susannah and then back to Eddie. His eyes were filling with some great emotion, as a pitcher fills with water when it is dipped in a spring.
“Roland?” Eddie asked uneasily. “Are you all right?” Roland whispered something. Eddie couldn’t hear what it was. Susannah looked scared. She glanced frantically at Eddie, as if to ask, What did you do to him?
Eddie took one of her hands in both of his own. “I think it’s all right.” Roland’s hand was clamped so tightly on the chunk of wood that Eddie was momentarily afraid he might snap it in two, but the wood was strong and Eddie had carved thick. The gunslinger’s throat bulged; his Adam’s apple rose and fell as he struggled with speech. And suddenly he yelled at the sky in a fair, strong voice:
“GONE! THE VOICES ARE GONE!”
He looked back at them, and Eddie saw something he had never expected to see in his life—not even if that life stretched over a thousand years. Roland of Gilead was weeping.
THE GUNSLINGER SLEPT SOUNDLY and dreamlessly that night for the first time in months, and he slept with the not-quite finished key clenched tightly in his hand.
IN ANOTHER WORLD, BUT beneath the shadow of the same ka-tet, Jake Chambers was having the most vivid dream of his life. He was walking through the tangled remains of an ancient forest— a dead zone of fallen trees and scruffy, aggravating bushes that bit his ankles and tried to steal his sneakers. He came to a thin belt of younger trees (alders, he thought, or perhaps beeches—he was a city boy, and the only thing he knew for sure about trees was that some had leaves and some had needles) and discovered a path through them. He made his way along this, moving a little faster. There was a clearing of some sort up ahead.
He stopped once before reaching it, when he spied some sort of stone marker to his right. He left the path to look at it. There were letters carved into it, but they were so eroded he couldn’t make them out. At last he closed his eyes (he had never done this in a dream before) and let his fingers trace each letter, like a blind boy reading Braille. Each formed in the darkness behind his lids until they made a sentence which stood forth in an outline of blue light: TRAVELLER, BEYOND LIES MID-WORLD.
Sleeping in his bed, Jake drew his knees up against his chest. The hand holding the key was under his pillow, and now his fingers tightened their grip on it. Mid-World, he thought, of course. St. Louis and Topeka and Oz and the World’s Fair and Charlie the Choo-Choo.