“The ash is a noble tree, and full of power,” Roland remarked from behind him, but Eddie barely heard. Henry’s sneering, hectoring voice was gone; his shame was gone with it. He thought only of the one branch that had caught his eye. It thickened and bulged slightly as it ran into the trunk. It was this oddly shaped thickness that Eddie wanted.
He thought the shape of the key was buried within it-the key he had seen briefly in the fire before the burning remains of the jawbone had changed again and the rose had appeared. Three inverted V’s, the center V both deeper and wider than the other two. And the little s-shape at the end. That was the secret.
A breath of his dream recurred: Dad-a-chum, dud-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
Maybe, he thought. But this time I’ll have to get all of it. I think that this time ninety per cent just won’t do.
Working with great care, he cut the branch from the tree and then trimmed the narrow end. He was left with a fat chunk of ash about nine inches long. It felt heavy and vital in his hand, very much alive and willing enough to give up its secret shape… to a man skillful enough to tease it out, that was.
Was he that man? And did it matter?
Eddie Dean thought the answer to both questions was yes.
The gunslinger’s good left hand closed over Eddie’s right hand. “I think you know a secret.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Can you tell?”
He shook his head. “Better not to, I think. Not yet.”
Roland thought this over, then nodded. “All right. I want to ask you one question, and then we’ll drop the subject. Have you perhaps seen some way into the heart of my… my problem?”
Eddie thought: And that’s as dose as he’ll ever come to showing the desperation that’s eating him alive.
“I don’t know. Right now I can’t tell for sure. But I hope so, man. I really, really do.”
Roland nodded again and released Eddie’s hand. “I thank you. We still have two hours of good daylight-why don’t we make use of them?”
“Fine by me.”
They moved on. Roland pushed Susannah and Eddie walked ahead of them, holding the chunk of wood with the key buried in it. It seemed to throb with its own warmth, secret and powerful.
32
THAT NIGHT, AFTER SUPPER was eaten, Eddie took the gunslinger’s knife from his belt and began to carve. The knife was amazingly sharp, and seemed never to lose its edge. Eddie worked slowly and carefully in the firelight, turning the chunk of ash this way and that in his hands, watching the curls of fine-grained wood rise ahead of his long, sure strokes.
Susannah lay down, laced her hands behind her head, and looked Up at the stars wheeling slowly across the black sky.
At the edge of the campsite, Roland stood beyond the glow of the fire and listened as the voices of madness rose once more in his aching, confused mind.
There was a boy.
There was no boy.
Was.
Wasn’t.
Was-
He closed his eyes, cupped his aching forehead in one cold hand, and wondered how long it would be until he simply snapped like an overwound bowstring.
Oh Jake, he thought. Where are you? Where are you?
And above the three of them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage.
II. KEY AND ROSE
1
FOR THREE WEEKS JOHN “Jake” Chambers fought bravely against the madness rising inside him. During that time he felt like the last man aboard a foundering ocean liner, working the bilge-pumps for dear life, trying to keep the ship afloat until the storm ended, the skies cleared, and help could arrive… help from somewhere. Help from anywhere. On May 31st, 1977, four days before school ended for the summer, he finally faced up to the fact that no help was going to come. It was time to give up; time to let the storm carry him away.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was his Final Essay in English Comp.
John Chambers, who was Jake to the three or four boys who were almost his friends (if his father had known this little factoid, he undoubtedly would have hit the roof), was finishing his first year at The Piper School. Although he was eleven and in the sixth grade, he was small for his age, and people meeting him for the first time often thought he was much younger. In fact, he had sometimes been mistaken for a girl until a year or so ago, when he had made such a fuss about having his hair cut short that his mother had finally relented and allowed it. With his father, of course, there had been no problem about the haircut. His father had just grinned his hard, stainless steel grin and said, The kid wants to look like a Marine, Laurie. Good for him.
To his father, he was never Jake and rarely John. To his father, he was usually just “the kid.”
The Piper School, his father had explained to him the summer before (the Bicentennial Summer, that had been-all bunting and flags and New York Harbor filled with Tall Ships), was, quite simply, The Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy Your Age. The fact that Jake had been accepted there had nothing to do with money, Elmer Chambers explained… almost insisted. He had been savagely proud of this fact, although, even at ten, Jake had suspected it might not be a true fact, that it might really be a bunch of bullshit his father had turned into a fact so he could casually drop it into the conversation at lunch or over cocktails: My kid? Oh, he’s going to Piper. Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy His Age. Money won’t buy you into that school, you know; for Piper, it’s brains or nothing.
Jake was perfectly aware that in the fierce furnace of Elmer Chambers’s mind, the gross carbon of wish and opinion was often blasted into the hard diamonds which he called facts… or, in more informal circumstances, “factoids.” His favorite phrase, spoken often and with reverence, was the fact is, and he used it every chance he got.
The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into The Piper School, his father had told him during that Bicentennial Summer, the summer of blue skies and bunting and Tall Ships, a summer which seemed golden in Jake’s memory because he had not yet begun to lose his mind and all he had to worry about was whether or not he could cut the mustard at The Piper School, which sounded like a nest for newly hatched geniuses. The only thing that gets you into a place like Piper is what you’ve got up here. Elmer Chambers had reached over his desk and tapped the center of his son’s forehead with a hard, nicotine-stained finger. Get me, kid?
Jake had nodded. It wasn’t necessary to talk to his father, because his father treated everyone-including his wife-the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.
Good, his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day. We understand each other, then. You’re going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn’t. He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat. So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses. there’s a trip to Disney World in it for you. That’s something to shoot for, right, kiddo?
Jake had made his grades-A’s in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw-the housekeeper-and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant anything. He wanted them to, but he had serious doubts.