A man wearing a white coat seized a pair ofcruel-looking forceps from a tray and pushed the rathead taheen nurse aside. Hebent, peering up between Mia’s legs and holding the forceps above his head.Standing close by, wearing a tee-shirt with words of Eddie and Susannah’s worldon it, was a taheen with the head of a fierce brown bird.
He’ll sense us, Roland thought. Ifwe stay long enough, he’ll surely sense us and raise the alarm.
But Susannah was looking at him, the eyesbelow the clamp of the hood feverish. Bright with understanding. Seeingthem, aye, say true.
She spoke a single word, and in a moment ofinexplicable but perfectly reliable intuition, Roland understood the word camenot from Susannah but from Mia. Yet it was also the Voice of the Beam, a forceperhaps sentient enough to understand how seriously it was threatened, and towant to protect itself.
Chassit was the word Susannah spoke;he heard it in his head because they were ka-tet and an-tet; he also saw itform soundlessly on her lips as she looked up toward the place where theyfloated, onlookers at something that was happening in some other where and whenat this very moment.
The hawk-headed taheen looked up, perhapsfollowing her gaze, perhaps hearing the chimes with its preternaturally sharpears. Then the doctor lowered his forceps and thrust them beneath Mia’s gown.She shrieked. Susannah shrieked with her. And as if Roland’s essentiallybodiless being could be pushed away by the force of those combined screams likea milkweed pod lifted and carried on a gust of October wind, the gunslingerfelt himself rise violently, losing touch with this place as he went, butholding onto that one word. It brought with it a brilliant memory of his motherleaning over him as he lay in bed. In the room of many colors, this had been,the nursery, and of course now he understood the colors he’d only accepted as ayoung boy, accepted as children barely out of their clouts accept everything:with unquestioning wonder, with the unspoken assumption that it’s allmagic.
The windows of the nursery had been stainedglass representing the Bends o’ the Rainbow, of course. He remembered hismother leaning toward him, her face pied with that lovely various light, herhood thrown back so he could trace the curve of her neck with the eye of a child
(it’s all magic)
and the soul of a lover; he rememberedthinking how he would court her and win her from his father, if she would havehim; how they would marry and have children of their own and live forever inthat fairy-tale kingdom called the All-A-Glow; and how she sang to him, howGabrielle Deschain sang to her little boy with his big eyes looking solemnly upat her from his pillow and his face already stamped with the many swimmingcolors of his wandering life, singing a lilting nonsense song that went likethis:
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!
Enough to fill my basket, he thoughtas he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the terrible sound of thetodash chimes. The words weren’t quite nonsense but old numbers, she’d told himonce when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit: seventeen, eighteen,nineteen.
Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Ofcourse, it’s all nineteen. Then he and Eddie were in light again, afever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oystanding at Jake’s left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled backto show his teeth.
Chussit, chissit, chassit, Rolandthought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in thedining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is nineteen. Enough to fill my basket.But what basket? What does it mean?
Four
Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, JohnCullum’s twelve-year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer andshe was just getting wa’amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazilyback and forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and thenrising so the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men whoappeared not only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with thecar’s motion like corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debriswhich collects in any old car that’s been hard-used: the ashes and pens andpaperclips and the world’s oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat andpine needles from the floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In thedarkness of the glove compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closeddoor.
Someone passing would undoubtedly have beenthunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff—and people! people who mightbe dead!—floating around in the car like jetsam in a space capsule.But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long Lakewere mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even thoughthere was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke wasalmost gone.
Lazily the car floated and inside it,Roland of Gilead rose slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against thedirty roof-liner and his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him.Eddie was first held in place by the wheel, but then some random sidewaysmotion of the car slid him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming.A silver line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining andfull of minuscule bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek.
Five
Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, hadprobably seen Eddie, as well. That was why she’d labored so hard to speak thatsingle word. Jake and Callahan, however, saw neither of them. The boy and thePere had entered the Dixie Pig, a thing that was either very brave or veryfoolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on whatthey’d found there.
Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proudof Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan:that distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pairof outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had comeready to fight. Callahan was holding Jake’s gun… and another thing, as well:some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of thelittle gods. The boy had Susannah’s ‘Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved fromonly the gods knew where.
The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanityended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she’d been wearinghung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood agood many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not hisattention—like that of the boy and the Pere at this verymoment—been focused on other matters.
Callahan’s low men, for instance. Theymight well be taheen, creatures neither of the Prim nor of the naturalworld but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two. They certainlyweren’t the sort of beings Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen asa result of the old ones’ ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, theymight be genuine taheen, sometimes known as the third people or the can-toi,and yes, Roland should have known. How many of the taheen now served the beingknown as the Crimson King? Some? Many?
All?
If the third answer was the correct one,Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to lookbeyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger’s nature, and in this casehis lack of imagination was surely a blessing.
Six
He saw what he needed to see. Although thecan-toi—Callahan’s low folk—had surrounded Jake and Callahan on allsides (the two of them hadn’t even seen the duo behind them, the ones who’dbeen guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street), the Pere had frozen them withthe carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with thekey he’d found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man andthe head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort tograb it.