The Dark Tower Read Online Free PDF Page B

was Callahan. He thought it was Eddie, using Callahan’s voice as Roland had. Somehow Eddie had found either smoother currents or more strength. Enough to get inside after Roland had been blown out. “They’ll kill him in front of you and drink his blood! ”
    It was finally enough. The boy turned and fled with Oy running beside him. He cut directly in front of the waseau-taheen and between two of the low folken, but none made any effort to grab him. They were still staring at the raised Turtle on Callahan’s palm, mesmerized.
    The Grandfathers paid no attention to the fleeing boy at all, as Roland had felt sure they would not. He knew from Pere Callahan’s story that one of the Grandfathers had come to the little town of ’Salem’s Lot where the Pere had for awhilepreached. The Pere had lived through the experience—not common for those who faced such monsters after losing their weapons and siguls of power—but the thing had forced Callahan to drink of its tainted blood before letting him go. It had marked him for these others.
    Callahan was holding his cross-sigul out toward them, but before Roland could see anything else, he was exhaled back into darkness. The chimes began again, all but driving him mad with their awful tintinnabulation. Somewhere, faintly, he could hear Eddie shouting. Roland reached for him in the dark, brushed Eddie’s arm, lost it, found his hand, and seized it. They rolled over and over, clutching each other, trying not to be separated, hoping not to be lost in the doorless dark between the worlds.

C HAPTER III:
E DDIE M AKES A C ALL
ONE
    Eddie returned to John Cullum’s old car the way he’d sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let alone where.
    He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and Roland were floating in each other’s arms like unborn twins in the womb, only this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape. Don’t waste your time, John, he thought. No true thread there, that’s a dead-end gadget if there ever was one.
    Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the domelight of John Cullum’s scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w—
    Then gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford’s cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie’s midsection hit the top of the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh. Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.
    Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!
    How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but there, the sound of bestial, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.
    Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger’s left hand, thinking: He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.
    May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it —“—and may you climb to the top,” Eddie breathed.
    They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked—askew but otherwise peacefully enough—at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them—
    Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his