To the right of where they descend the far side of the draw, a horse has been tethered in the shade of what Jack thinks is a Joshua tree. About twenty yards down the draw to the left is a circle of eroded stones. Inside it a fire, not yet lit, has been carefully laid. Jack doesn’t like the look of the place much—the stones remind him of ancient teeth. Nor is he alone in his dislike. Sophie stops, her grip on his fingers tightening.
“Parkus, do we have to go in there? Please say we don’t.”
Parkus turns to her with a kindly smile Jack knows well: a Speedy Parker smile for sure.
“The Speaking Demon’s been gone from this circle many the long age, darling,” he says. “And you know that such as yon are best for stories.”
“Yet—”
“Now’s no time to give in to the willies,” Parkus tells her. He speaks with a trace of impatience, and “willies” isn’t precisely the word he uses, but only how Jack’s mind translates it. “You waited for him to come in the Little Sisters’ hospital tent—”
“Only because she was there on the other side—”
“—and now I want you to come along.” All at once he seems taller to Jack. His eyes flash. Jack thinks: A gunslinger. Yes, I suppose he could be a gunslinger. Like in one of Mom’s old movies, only for real.
“All right,” she says, low. “If we must.” Then she looks at Jack. “I wonder if you’d put your arm around me?”
Jack, we may be sure, is happy to oblige.
As they step between two of the stones, Jack seems to hear an ugly twist of whispered words. Among them, one voice is momentarily clear, seeming to leave a trail of slime behind it as it enters his ear: Drudge drudge drudge, oho the bledding foodzies, soon he cummz, my good friend Munshun, and such a prize I have for him, oho, oho—
Jack looks at his old friend as Parkus hunkers by a tow sack and loosens the drawstring at the top. “He’s close, isn’t he? The Fisherman. And Black House, that’s close, too.”
“Yep,” Parkus says, and from the sack he spills the gutted corpses of a dozen plump dead birds.
Thoughts of Irma Freneau reenter Jack’s head at the sight of the grouse, and he thinks he won’t be able to eat. Watching as Parkus and Sophie skewer the birds on greensticks reinforces this idea. But after the fire is lit and the birds begin to brown, his stomach weighs in, insisting that the grouse smell wonderful and will probably taste even better. Over here, he remembers, everything always does.
“And here we are, in the speaking circle,” Parkus says. His smiles have been put away for the nonce. He looks at Jack and Sophie, who sit side by side and still holding hands, with somber gravity. His guitar has been propped against a nearby rock. Beside it, Sacred and Profane sleeps with its two heads tucked into its feathers, dreaming its no doubt bifurcated dreams. “The Demon may be long gone, but the legends say such things leave a residue that may lighten the tongue.”
“Like kissing the Blarney Stone, maybe,” Jack suggests.
Parkus shakes his head. “No blarney today.”
Jack says, “If only we were dealing with an ordinary scumbag. That I could handle.”
Sophie looks at him, puzzled.
“He means a dust-off artist,” Parkus tells her. “A hardcase.” He looks at Jack. “And in one way, that is what you’re dealing with. Carl Bierstone isn’t much—an ordinary monster, let’s say. Which is not to say he couldn’t do with a spot of killing. But as for what’s going on in French Landing, he has been used. Possessed, you’d say in your world, Jack. Taken by the spirits, we’d say in the Territories—”
“Or brought low by pigs,” Sophie adds.
“Yes.” Parkus is nodding. “In the world just beyond this borderland—Mid-World—they would say he has been infested by a demon. But a demon far greater than the poor, tattered spirit that once lived in this circle of stones.”
Jack hardly hears that. His eyes are glowing. It sounded something like beer stein, George Potter told him last night, a thousand years ago. That’s not it, but it’s close.
“Carl Bierstone,” he says. He raises a clenched fist, then shakes it in triumph. “That was his name in Chicago. Burnside here in French Landing. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly. Where is he, Speedy? Save me some time h—”
“Shut . . . up,” Parkus says.
The tone is low and almost deadly. Jack can feel Sophie shrink against him. He does a little shrinking himself. This sounds nothing like his old friend, nothing at all. You have to stop thinking of him as Speedy, Jack tells himself. That’s not who he is or ever was. That was just a character he played, someone who could both soothe and charm a scared kid on the run with his mother.
Parkus turns the birds, which are now browned nicely on one side and spitting juice into the fire.
“I’m sorry to speak harsh to you, Jack, but you have to realize that your Fisherman is pretty small fry compared to what’s really going on.”
Why don’t you tell Tansy Freneau he’s small fry? Why don’t you tell Beezer St. Pierre?
Jack thinks these things, but doesn’t say them out loud. He’s more than a little afraid of the light he saw in Parkus’s eyes.
“Nor is it about Twinners,” Parkus says. “You got to get that idea out of your mind. That’s just something that has to do with your world and the world of the Territories—a link. You can’t kill some hardcase over here and end the career of your cannibal over there. And if you kill him over there, in Wisconsin, the thing inside will just jump to another host.”
“The thing—?”
“When it was in Albert Fish, Fish called it the Monday Man. Fellow you’re after calls it Mr. Munshun. Both are only ways of trying to say something that can’t be pronounced by any earthly tongue on any earthly world.”
“How many worlds are there, Speedy?”
“Many,” Parkus says, looking into the fire. “And this business concerns every one of them. Why else do you think I’ve been after you like I have? Sending you feathers, sending you robins’ eggs, doing every damned thing I could to make you wake up.”
Jack thinks of Judy, scratching on walls until the tips of her fingers were bloody, and feels ashamed. Speedy has been doing much the same thing, it seems. “Wake up, wake up, you dunderhead,” he says.
Parkus seems caught between reproof and a smile. “For sure you must have seen me in the case that sent you running out of L.A.”
“Ah, man—why do you think I went?”
“You ran like Jonah, when God told him to go preach against the wickedness in Nineveh. Thought I was gonna have to send a whale to come and swallow you up.”
“I feel swallowed,” Jack tells him.
In a small voice, Sophie says: “I do, too.”
“We’ve all been swallowed,” says the man with the gun on his hip. “We’re in the belly of the beast, like it or not. It’s ka, which is destiny and fate. Your Fisherman, Jack, is now your ka. Our ka. This is more than murder. Much more.”
And Jack sees something that frankly scares the shit out of him. Lester Parker, a.k.a. Speedy, a.k.a. Parkus, is himself scared almost to death.
“This business concerns the Dark Tower,” he says.
Beside Jack, Sophie gives a low, desperate cry of terror and lowers her head. At the same time she raises one hand and forks the sign of the Evil Eye at Parkus, over and over.
That gentleman doesn’t seem to take it amiss. He simply sets to work turning the birds again on their sticks. “Listen to me, now,” he says. “Listen, and ask as few questions as you can. We still have a chance to get Judy Marshall’s son back, but time is blowing in our teeth.”
“Talk,” Jack says.
Parkus talks. At some point in his tale he judges the birds done and serves them out on flat stones. The meat is tender, almost falling off the small bones. Jack eats hungrily, drinking deep of the sweet water from Parkus’s waterskin each time it comes around to him. He wastes no more time comparing dead children to dead grouse. The furnace needs to be stoked, and he stokes it with a will. So does Sophie, eating with her fingers and licking them clean without the slightest reserve or embarrassment. So, in the end, does Wendell Green, although he refuses to enter the circle of old stones. When Parkus tosses him a golden-brown grouse, however, Wendell catches it with remarkable adroitness and buries his face in the moist meat.