The Dark Tower Series by King Stephen

Author:King, Stephen
Format: epub

Part One

ToDash

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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.

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