Telford's hand. He sat down on the first bench, still holding it.
Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and no one needed to ask for an
explanation.
"This is chickenshit."
He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a moment, even Eisenhart and Adams
dropped their eyes. Overholser kept his head up, but under the Old Fella's hard gaze, the rancher looked
petulant rather than defiant.
"Chickenshit," the man in the black coat and turned-around collar repeated, enunciating each syllable. A
small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards collar. On his forehead, that other cross—the one
Zalia believed he'd carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some awful sin—glared
under the lamps like a tattoo.
"This young man isn't one of my flock, but he's right, and I think you all know it. You know it in your hearts.
Even you, Mr. Overholser. And you, George Telford."
"Know no such thing," Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped of its former persuasive charm.
"All your lies will cross your eyes, that's what my mother would have told you." Callahan offered Telford a
thin smile Tian wouldn't have wanted pointed in his direction. And then Callahan did turn to him. "I never
heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy. Thankee-sai."
Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He felt like a character in a silly festival
play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.
"I know a bit about cowardice, may it do ya," Callahan said, turning to the men on the benches. He raised his
right hand, misshapen and twisted by some old burn, looked at it fixedly, then dropped it to his side again. "I
have personal experience, you might say. I know how one cowardly decision leads to another… and
another… and another… until it's too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I assure you the tree
of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your souls are in
danger."
"Hail Mary, full of grace," said someone on the left side of the room, "the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the
fruit of thy womb, J—"
"Bag it," Callahan snapped. "Save it for Sunday." His eyes, blue sparks in their deep hollows, studied them.
"For this night, never mind God and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the light-sticks and the buzz-bugs
of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You're the men of the Calla, are you not? Then act like men. Stop
behaving like dogs crawling on their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master.
Overholser went dark red at that, and began to stand. Diego Adams grabbed his arm and spoke in his ear. For
a moment Overholser remained as he was, frozen in a kind of crouch, and then he sat back down. Adams
stood up.
"Sounds good, padrone" Adams said in his heavy accent. "Sounds brave. Yet there are still a few questions,
mayhap. Haycox asked one of em. How can ranchers and farmers stand against armed killers?"
"By hiring armed killers of our own," Callahan replied.
There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the Old Fella had lapsed into another
language. At last Diego Adams said—cautiously, "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," the Old Fella said. "So listen and gain wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen
and gain wisdom. Not six days' ride nor'west of us, and bound southeast along the Path of the Beam, come
three gunslingers and one 'prentice." He smiled at their amazement. Then he turned to Slightman. "The
'prentice isn't much older than your boy Ben, but he's already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion.
The others are quicker and deadlier by far. I have it from Andy, who's seen them. You want hard calibers?
They're at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it."
This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned as if with a fever. His great pod of a
belly trembled. "What children's goodnight story is this?" he asked. "If there ever were such men, they passed
out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years."
There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any kind. The crowd was still frozen,
caught in the reverberation of that one mythic word: gunslingers.
"You're wrong," Callahan said, "but we don't need to fight over it. We can go and see for ourselves. A small
party will do, I think. Jaffords here… myself… and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?"
"There ain't no gunslingers!" Overholser roared.
Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. "Pere Callahan, God's grace on you—"
"—and you, Jorge."
"—but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty
normal men, but forty or sixty Wolves?"
"Hear him, he speaks sense!" Eben Took, the storekeeper, called out.
"And why would they fight for us?" Estrada continued. "We make it from year to year, but not much more.
What could we offer them, beyond a few hot meals? And what man agrees to the for his dinner?"
"Hear him, hear him!" Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in unison. Others stamped rhythmically up
and down on the boards.
The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: "I have books in the rectory. Half a dozen."
Although most of them knew this, the thought of books— all that paper—still provoked a general sigh of
wonder.
"According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward. Supposedly because they descend
from the line of Arthur Eld."
"The Eld! The Eld!" the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers
pointed. Hook em horns, the Old Fella thought. Go, Texas. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the smile
that rose on his lips.
"Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?" Telford asked in a gendy mocking
voice. "Surely you're too old for such tales, Pere."
"Not hardcases," Callahan said patiendy, "gunslingers."
"How can three men stand against the Wolves, Pere?" Tian heard himself ask.
According to Andy, one of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need to muddy the
waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to, just the same). "That's a question for their dinh,
Tian. We'll ask him. And they wouldn't just be fighting for their suppers, you know. Not at all."
"What else, then?" Bucky Javier asked.
Callahan thought they would want the thing that lay beneath the floorboards of his church. And that was
good, because that thing had awakened. The Old Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem's Lot
in another world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn't rid of it soon, it would kill him.
Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.
"In time, Mr. Javier," Callahan said. "All in good time, sai."
Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along the benches from mouth to mouth, a
breeze of hope and fear.
Gunslingers.
Gunslingers to the west, come out of Mid-World.
And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld's last deadly children, moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along
the Path of the Beam. Ka like a wind.
"Time to be men," Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet
his tone was not without compassion. "Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true."
Part One
ToDash
Contents -Prev / Next
Part 1: ToDash -- Chapter I: The Face on the Water
ONE
Time is a face on the water. This was a proverb from the long-ago, in far-off Mejis. Eddie Dean had never
been there.
Except he had, in a way. Roland had carried all four of his companions—Eddie, Susannah, Jake, Oy—to
Mejis one night, storying long as they camped on 1-70, the Kansas Turnpike in a Kansas that never was. That
night he had told them the story of Susan Delgado, his first love. Perhaps his only love. And how he had lost
her.
The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie
thought it was even truer now, as the world wound down like the mainspring in an ancient watch. Roland had
told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass could no longer be trusted in Mid-World;
what was dead west today might be southwest tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise
begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty hours long, some of them followed by
nights (like the one on which Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there would
come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness bloom as night rushed over the horizon to
meet you. Eddie wondered if time had gotten lost.
They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the Mono. Blaine is a pain, Jake had said on
several occasions, but he—or it—turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the Mono had been
utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic ("Somethin you're just naturally good at, sugar," Susannah told him),
and they had detrained in a Topeka which wasn't quite part of the world from which Eddie, Susannah, and
Jake had come. Which was good, really, because this world—one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team
was called The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese car-maker was Takuro
rather than Honda— had been overwhelmed by some sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone.
So stick that in your Takuro Spirit and drive it, Eddie thought.
The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this. During much of it he'd been scared
shitless— he guessed all of them had been, except maybe for Roland—but yes, it had seemed real and clear.
He'd not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even when they'd been walking up 1-70 with
bullets in their ears, looking at the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a thinny.
But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake's old friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland's old
friend (Flagg… or Marten… or—just perhaps—Maerlyn), time had changed.
Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball... saw Roland kill his mother by mistake… and
when we came back…
Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing perhaps thirty miles from the Green
Palace. They had still been able to see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world.
Someone—or some force—had carried them over or through the thinny and back to the Path of the Beam.
Whoever or whatever it had been, it had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch,
complete with Nozz-A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of Keebler cookies.
Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in the
Palace: "Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning." Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renounce
the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would
renounce Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.
We got some daylight left, Eddie had said on the day they'd found Flagg's warning note. You want to use it, or
what?
Yes, Roland of Gilead had replied. Let's use it.
And so they had, following the Path of the Beam through endless open fields that were divided from each
other by belts of straggly, annoying underbrush. There had been no sign of people. Skies had remained low
and cloudy day after day and night after night. Because they followed the Path of the Beam, the clouds
directly above them sometimes roiled and broke open, revealing patches of blue, but never for long. One
night they opened long enough to disclose a full moon with a face clearly visible on it: the nasty,
complicitous squint-and-grin of the Peddler. That made it late summer by Roland's reckoning, but to Eddie it
looked like half-past no time at all, the grass mostly listless or outright dead, the trees (what few there were)
bare, the bushes scrubby and brown. There was little game, and for the first time in weeks—since leaving the
forest ruled by Shardik, the cyborg bear—they sometimes went to bed with their bellies not quite full.
Yet none of that, Eddie thought, was quite as annoying as the sense of having lost hold of time itself: no
hours, no days, no weeks, no seasons, for God's sake. The moon might have told Roland it was the end of
summer, but the world around them looked like the first week of November, dozing sleepily toward winter.
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of
interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring
shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed
up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.
Had everything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to do but push Susannah's
wheelchair through one boring field after another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only
peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard's Glass was what Jake called the Mystery
Number, and that probably meant nothing. They'd needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of Lud
in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the Mystery Number was a holdover from that.
Eddie was far from sure she was right, but hey, it was a theory.
