Black House by Stephen King

“You asked how many worlds,” Parkus begins. “The answer, in the High Speech, is da fan: worlds beyond telling.” With one of the blackened sticks he draws a figure eight on its side, which Jack recognizes as the Greek symbol for infinity.

“There is a Tower that binds them in place. Think of it as an axle upon which many wheels spin, if you like. And there is an entity that would bring this Tower down. Ram Abbalah.”

At these words, the flames of the fire seem to momentarily darken and turn red. Jack wishes he could believe that this is only a trick of his overstrained mind, but cannot. “The Crimson King,” he says.

“Yes. His physical being is pent in a cell at the top of the Tower, but he has another manifestation, every bit as real, and this lives in Can-tah Abbalah—the Court of the Crimson King.”

“Two places at once.” Given his journeying between the world of America and the world of the Territories, Jack has little trouble swallowing this concept.

“Yes.”

“If he—or it—destroys the Tower, won’t that defeat his purpose? Won’t he destroy his physical being in the process?”

“Just the opposite: he’ll set it free to wander what will then be chaos . . . din-tah . . . the furnace. Some parts of Mid-World have fallen into that furnace already.”

“How much of this do I actually need to know?” Jack asks. He is aware that time is fleeting by on his side of the wall, as well.

“Hard telling what you need to know and what you don’t,” Parkus says. “If I leave out the wrong piece of information, maybe all the stars go dark. Not just here, but in a thousand thousand universes. That’s the pure hell of it. Listen, Jack—the King has been trying to destroy the Tower and set himself free for time out of mind. Forever, mayhap. It’s slow work, because the Tower is bound in place by crisscrossing force beams that act on it like guy wires. The Beams have held for millennia, and would hold for millennia to come, but in the last two hundred years—that’s speaking of time as you count it, Jack; to you, Sophie, it would be Full-Earth almost five hundred times over—”

“So long,” she says. It’s almost a sigh. “So very long.”

“In the great sweep of things, it’s as short as the gleam of a single match in a dark room. But while good things usually take a long time to develop, evil has a way of popping up full-blown and ready-made, like Jack out of his box. Ka is a friend to evil as well as to good. It embraces both. And, speaking of Jack . . .” Parkus turns to him. “You’ve heard of the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, of course?”

Jack nods.

“On the upper levels of the Tower, there are those who call the last two hundred or so years in your world the Age of Poisoned Thought. That means—”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Jack says. “I knew Morgan Sloat, remember? I knew what he planned for Sophie’s world.” Yes, indeed. The basic plan had been to turn one of the universe’s sweetest honeycombs into first a vacation spot for the rich, then a source of unskilled labor, and finally a waste pit, probably radioactive. If that wasn’t an example of poisoned thought, Jack doesn’t know what is.

Parkus says, “Rational beings have always harbored telepaths among their number; that’s true in all the worlds. But they’re ordinarily rare creatures. Prodigies, you might say. But since the Age of Poisoned Thought came on your world, Jack—infested it like a demon—such beings have become much more common. Not as common as slow mutants in the Blasted Lands, but common, yes.”

“You speak of mind readers,” Sophie says, as if wanting to be sure.

“Yes,” Parkus agrees, “but not just mind readers. Precognates. Teleports—world jumpers like old Travelin’ Jack here, in other words—and telekinetics. Mind readers are the most common, telekinetics the rarest . . . and the most valuable.”

“To him, you mean,” Jack says. “To the Crimson King.”

“Yes. Over the last two hundred years or so, the abbalah has spent a good part of his time gathering a crew of telepathic slaves. Most of them come from Earth and the Territories. All of the telekinetics come from Earth. This collection of slaves—this gulag—is his crowning achievement. We call them Breakers. They . . .” He trails off, thinking. Then: “Do you know how a galley travels?”

Sophie nods, but Jack at first has no idea what Parkus is talking about. He has a brief, lunatic vision of a fully equipped kitchen traveling down Route 66.

“Many oarsmen,” Sophie says, then makes a rowing motion that throws her breasts into charming relief.

Parkus is nodding. “Usually slaves chained together. They—”

From outside the circle, Wendell suddenly sticks his own oar in. “Spart. Cus.” He pauses, frowning, then tries it again. “Spart-a-cus.”

“What’s he on about?” Parkus asks, frowning. “Any idea, Jack?”

“A movie called Spartacus,” Jack says, “and you’re wrong as usual, Wendell. I believe you’re thinking about Ben-Hur.”

Looking sulky, Wendell holds out his greasy hands. “More. Meat.”

Parkus pulls the last grouse from its sizzling stick and tosses it between two of the stones, where Wendell sits with his pallid, greasy face peering from between his knees. “Fresh prey for the news hawk,” he says. “Now do us a favor and shut up.”

“Or. What.” The old defiant gleam is rising in Wendell’s eyes.

Parkus draws his shooting iron partway from its holster. The grip, made of sandalwood, is worn, but the barrel gleams murder-bright. He has to say no more; holding his second bird in one hand, Wendell Green hitches up his robe and hies himself back over the rise. Jack is extremely relieved to see him go. Spartacus indeed, he thinks, and snorts.

“So the Crimson King wants to use these Breakers to destroy the Beams,” Jack says. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s his plan.”

“You speak as though of the future,” Parkus says mildly. “This is happening now, Jack. Only look at your own world if you want to see the ongoing disintegration. Of the six Beams, only one still holds true. Two others still generate some holding power. The other three are dead. One of these went out thousands of years ago, in the ordinary course of things. The others . . . killed by the Breakers. All in two centuries or less.”

“Christ,” Jack says. He is beginning to understand how Speedy could call the Fisherman small-fry.

“The job of protecting the Tower and the Beams has always belonged to the ancient war guild of Gilead, called gunslingers in this world and many others. They also generated a powerful psychic force, Jack, one fully capable of countering the Crimson King’s Breakers, but—”

“The gunslingers are all gone save for one,” Sophie says, looking at the big pistol on Parkus’s hip. And, with timid hope: “Unless you really are one, too, Parkus.”

“Not I, darling,” he says, “but there’s more than one.”

“I thought Roland was the last. So the stories say.”

“He has made at least three others,” Parkus tells her. “I’ve no idea how that can be possible, but I believe it to be true. If Roland were still alone, the Breakers would have toppled the Tower long since. But with the force of these others added to his—”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about,” Jack says. “I did, sort of, but you lost me about two turns back.”

“There’s no need for you to understand it all in order to do your job,” Parkus says.

“Thank God for that.”

“As for what you do need to understand, leave galleys and oarsmen and think in terms of the Western movies your mother used to make. To begin with, imagine a fort in the desert.”

“This Dark Tower you keep talking about. That’s the fort.”

“Yes. And surrounding the fort, instead of wild Indians—”

“The Breakers. Led by Big Chief Abbalah.”

Sophie murmurs: “The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.”

Jack feels a light but singularly unpleasant chill shake up his spine: he thinks of rat paws scuttering over broken glass. “What? Why do you say that?”

Sophie looks at him, flushes, shakes her head, looks down. “It’s what she says, sometimes. Judy. It’s how I hear her, sometimes.”

Parkus seizes one of the charred greensticks and draws in the rocky dust beside the figure-eight shape. “Fort here. Marauding Indians here, led by their merciless, evil—and most likely insane—chief. But over here—” Off to the left, he draws a harsh arrow in the dirt. It points at the rudimentary shapes indicating the fort and the besieging Indians. “What always arrives at the last moment in all the best Lily Cavanaugh Westerns?”