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 fucked-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.
At this point any reasonable driver would pull over to the side of the road, stop his vehicle, and take care of his wayward animal. Bryan Smith, however, has never gotten high marks for reason when behind the wheel, and has the driving record to prove it. Instead of pulling over, he twists around to the right, steering with his left hand and shoving ineffectually at the top of the rottweiler's flat head with his right.
"Leave 'at alone!" he shouts at Bullet as his minivan drifts first toward the righthand shoulder and then onto it. "Din'you hear me, Bullet? Aw you foolish? Leave 'at alone! "He actually succeeds in shoving the dog's head up for a moment, but there's no fur for his fingers to grasp and Bullet, while no genius, is smart enough to know he has at least one more chance to grab the stuff in the white paper, the stuff radiating that entrancing red smell. He dips beneath Bryan's hand and seizes the wrapped package of hamburger in his jaws.
"Drop it!" Bryan screams. "You drop it right... NOW!"
In order to gain the purchase necessary to twist further in the driver's bucket, he presses down firmly with both feet. One of them, unfortunately, is on the