Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“I got three hundred dollars when I went back to the house to get my car, and I had thirty or forty with me. Also credit cards, but your late friend said to use cash as long as I could.

Until you go on by yourself, if possible. He said there might be folks looking for you. He

called them ‘low men.’ ”

Roland nodded. Yes, there would be low men out there, and after all he and his ka-tet had

done to thwart the plans of their master, they’d be twice as eager to have his head.

Preferably smoking, and on the end of a stick. Also the head of sai Tassenbaum, if they

found out about her.

“What else did Jake tell you?” Roland asked.

“That I must take you to New York City, if you wanted to go there. He said there’s a door

there that will take you to a place called Faydag.”

“Was there more?”

“Yes. He said there was another place you might want to go before you used the door.”

She gave him a timid little sideways glance. “Is there?”

He considered this, then nodded.

“He also spoke to the dog. It sounded as if he was giving the dog…orders? Instructions?”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Could that be?”

Roland thought it could. The woman Jake could only ask. As for Oy…well, it might

explain why the bumbler hadn’t stayed by the grave, much as he might have wanted to.

For awhile they traveled in silence. The road they were on led to a much busier one, filled

with cars and trucks running at high speed in many lanes. She had to stop at a tollbooth and

give money to get on. The toll-taker was a robot with a basket for an arm. Roland thought

he might be able to sleep, but he saw Jake’s face when he closed his eyes. Then Eddie’s,

with the useless bandage covering his forehead.If this is what comes when I close my eyes,

he thought,what will my dreams be like?

He opened his eyes again and watched as she drove down a smooth, paved ramp, slipping

into the heavy flow of traffic without a pause. He leaned over and looked up through the

window on his side. There were the clouds,los ángeles, traveling above them, in the same

direction. They were still on the Path of the Beam.

Thirteen

“Mister? Roland?”

She thought he had been dozing with his eyes open. Now he turned to her from where he

sat in the passenger bucket seat with his hands in his lap, the good one folded over the

mutilated one, hiding it. She thought she had never seen anyone who looked less like he

belonged in a Mercedes-Benz. Or any automobile. She also thought she had never seen a

man who looked so tired.

But he’s not used up. I don’t think he’s anywhere near used up, although he may think

otherwise.

“The animal…Oy?”

“Oy, yes.” The bumbler looked up at the sound of his name, but didn’t repeat it as he might

have done only yesterday.

“Is it a dog? It isn’t, exactly, is it?”

“He, not it. And no, he’s not a dog.”

Irene Tassenbaum opened her mouth, then closed it again. This was difficult, because

silence in company did not come naturally to her. And she was with a man she found

attractive, even in his grief and exhaustion (perhaps to some degree because of those

things). A dying boy had asked her to take this man to New York City, and get him to the

places he needed to go once they were there. He’d said that his friend knew even less about

New York than he did about money, and she believed that was true. But she also believed

this man was dangerous. She wanted to ask more questions, but what if he answered them?

She understood that the less she knew, the better her chance, once he was gone, of merging

into the life she’d been living at quarter to four this afternoon. To merge the way you

merged onto the turnpike from a side road. That would be best.

She turned on the radio and found a station playing “Amazing Grace.” The next time she

looked at her strange companion, she saw that he was looking out at the darkening sky and

weeping. Then she chanced to look down and saw something much odder, something that

moved her heart as it had not been moved in fifteen years, when she had miscarried her one

and only effort to have a child.

The animal, the not-dog, the Oy…he was crying, too.

Fourteen

She got off 95 just over the Massachusetts state line and checked them into a pair of

side-by-side rooms in a dump called the Sea Breeze Inn. She hadn’t thought to bring her

driving glasses, the ones she called her bug’s-asshole glasses (as in “when I’m wearing these things I can see up a bug’s asshole”), and she didn’t like driving at night, anyway.

Bug’s-asshole glasses or not, driving at night fried her nerves, and that was apt to bring on a migraine. With a migraine she would be of no use to either of them, and her Imitrex was

sitting uselessly in the medicine cabinet back in East Stoneham.

“Plus,” she told Roland, “if this Tet Corporation you’re looking for is in a business

building, you won’t be able to get inside until Monday, anyway.” Probably not true; this

was the sort of man who got into places when he wanted. You couldn’t keep him out. She

guessed that was part of his attraction to a certain kind of woman.

In any case, he did not object to the motel. No, he would not go out to dinner with her, and

so she found the nearest bearable fast-food franchise and brought back a late dinner from

KFC. They ate in Roland’s room. Irene fixed Oy a plate without being asked. Oy ate a

single piece of the chicken, holding it neatly between his paws, then went into the

bathroom and appeared to fall asleep on the mat in front of the tub.

“Why do they call this the Sea Breeze?” Roland asked. Unlike Oy, he was eating some of

everything, but he did it with no sign of pleasure. He ate like a man doing work. “I get no

smell of the ocean.”

“Well, probably you can when the wind’s in the right quarter and blowing a hurricane,”

she said. “It’s what we call poetic license, Roland.”

He nodded, showing unexpected (to her, at least) understanding. “Pretty lies,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose.”

She turned on the television, thinking it would divert him, and was shocked by his reaction

(although she told herself that what she felt was amusement). When he told her he couldn’t

see it, she had no idea how to take what he was saying; her first thought that it was some

sort of oblique andteddibly intellectual criticism of the medium itself. Then she thought he

might be speaking (in equally oblique fashion) of his sorrow, his state of mourning. It

wasn’t until he told her that he heard voices, yes, but saw only lines which made his eyes

water that she realized he was telling her the literal truth: he could not see the pictures on the screen. Not the rerun ofRoseanne, not the infomercial for Ab-Flex, not the talking head

on the local news. She held on until the story about Stephen King (taken by LifeFlight

helicopter to Central Maine General in Lewiston, where an early-evening operation

seemed to have saved his right leg—condition listed as fair, more operations ahead, road to

recovery expected to be long and uncertain), then turned the TV off.

She bussed up the trash—there was always so muchmore of it from a KFC meal,

somehow—bade Roland an uncertain goodnight (which he returned in a distracted,

I’m-not-really-here way that made her nervous and sad), then went to her own room next

door. There she watched an hour of an old movie in which Yul Brynner played a robot

cowboy that had run amok before turning it off and going into the bathroom to brush her

teeth. There she realized that she had—ofcourse, dollink!—forgotten her toothbrush. She did the best she could with her finger, then lay down on the bed in her bra and panties (no

nightgown either). She spent an hour like that before realizing that she was listening for

sounds from beyond the paper-thin wall, and for one sound in particular: the crash of the

gun he had considerately not worn from the car to the motel room. The single loud shot that

would mean he had ended his sorrow in the most direct fashion.

When she couldn’t stand the quiet from the other side of the wall any longer she got up, put

her clothes back on, and went outside to look at the stars. There, sitting on the curb, she