Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll find the Dark Tower, and nothing will stand against us, and

before we go in, we’ll speak their names. All of the lost.”

“Your list will be longer than mine,” she said, “but mine will be long enough.”

To this Roland did not reply, but the robot huckster, perhaps startled out of its long sleep

by the sound of their voices, did. “Girls, girls,girls! ” it cried from inside the batwing doors of the Gaiety Bar and Grill. “Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t

tell, who cares, they give, you tell, girls tell, you tell…” There was a pause and then the robot huckster shouted one final word—“SATISFACTION!”—and fell silent.

“By the gods, but this is a sad place,” he said. “We’ll stay the night and then see it no

more.”

“At least the sun’s out, and that’s a relief after Thunderclap, but isn’t itcold! ”

He nodded, then asked about the others.

“They’ve gone on,” she said, “but there was a minute there when I didn’t think any of us

were going anywhere except to the bottom of yonder crevasse.”

She pointed to the end of the Fedic high street furthest from the castle wall.

“There are TV screens that still work in some of the traincars, and as we came up on town

we got a fine view of the bridge that’s gone. We could see the ends sticking out over the

hole, but the gap in the middle had to be a hundred yards across. Maybe more. We could

see the train trestle, too. That was still intact. The train was slowing down by then, but not enough so any of us could have jumped off. By then there was no time. And the jump

would likely have killed anyone who tried. We were going, oh I’m gonna say fifty miles an

hour. And as soon as we were on the trestle, the fucking thing started to creak and groan. Or to queel and grale, if you’ve ever read your James Thurber, which I suppose you have not.

The train was playing music. Like Blaine did, do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“But we could hear the trestle getting ready to let go even over that. Then everything

started shaking from side to side. A voice—very calm and soothing—said, ‘We are

experiencing minor difficulties, please take your seats.’ Dinky was holding that little

Russian girl, Dani. Ted took my hands and said, ‘I want to tell you, madam, that it has been

a pleasure to know you.’ There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my

seat—would have, if Ted hadn’t been holding onto me—and I thought ‘That’s it, we’re

gone, please God let me be dead before whatever’s down there gets its teeth into me,’ and

for a second or two we were going backward.Backward, Roland! I could see the whole

car—we were in the first one behind the loco—tilting up. There was the sound of tearing

metal. Then the good oldSpirit of Topeka put on a burst of speed. Say what you want to

about the old people, I know they got a lot of things wrong, but they built machines that had someballs .

“The next thing I knew, we were coasting into the station. And here comes that same

soothing voice, this time telling us to look around our seats and make sure we’ve got all our personals—our gunna, you ken. Like we were on a damn TWA flight landing at Idlewild!

It wasn’t until we were out on the platform that we saw the last nine cars of the train were

gone. Thank God they were all empty.” She cast a baleful (but frightened) eye toward the

far end of the street. “Hope whatever’s down there chokes on em.”

Then she brightened.

“There’s one good thing—at speeds of up to three hundred miles an hour, which is what

that ain’t-we-happy voice said theSpirit of Topeka was doing, we must have left Master

Spider-Boy in the dust.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Roland said.

She rolled her eyes wearily. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Ido tell you. But we’ll deal with Mordred when the time comes, and I don’t think that will

be today.”

“Good.”

“Have you been beneath the Dogan again? I take it you have.”

Susannah’s eyes grew round. “Isn’t itsomething ? Makes Grand Central look like a train

station someplace out in Sticksville, U.S.A. How long did it take you to find your way up?”

“If it had just been me, I’d still be wandering around down there,” Roland admitted. “Oy

found the way out. I assumed he was following your scent.”

Susannah considered this. “Maybe he was. Jake’s, more likely. Did you cross a wide

passage with a sign on the wall readingSHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS

NOT ACCEPTED ?”

Roland nodded, but the fading sign painted on the wall had meant little to him. He had

identified the passage which the Wolves took at the beginning of their raids by the sight of

two motionless gray horses far down the passage, and another of those snarling masks. He

had also seen a moccasin he remembered quite well, one that had been made from a chunk

of rubber. One of Ted’s or Dinky’s, he decided; Sheemie Ruiz had no doubt been buried in

his.

“So,” he said. “You got off the train—how many were you?”

“Five, with Sheemie gone,” she said. “Me, Ted, Dinky, Dani Rostov, and Fred

Worthington—do you remember Fred?”

Roland nodded. The man in the bankerly suit.

“I gave them the guided tour of the Dogan,” she said. “As much as I could, anyway. The

beds where they stole the brains out of the kids and the one where Mia finally gave birth to

her monster; the one-way door between Fedic and the Dixie Pig in New York that still

works; Nigel’s apartment.

“Ted and his friends were pretty amazed by the rotunda where all the doors are, especially the one going to Dallas in 1963, where President Kennedy was killed. We found another

door two levels down—this is where most of the passages are—that goes to Ford’s Theater,

where President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. There’s even a poster for the play he

was watching when Booth shot him.Our American Cousin, it was called. What kind of

people would want to go and watch things like that?”

Roland thought a lot of people might, actually, but knew better than to say so.

“It’s all very old,” she said. “And very hot. And very fucking scary, if you want to know

the truth. Most of the machinery has quit, and there are puddles of water and oil and God

knows what everywhere. Some of the puddles gave off a glow, and Dinky said he thought it

might be radiation. I don’t like to think what I got growin on my bones or when my hair’ll

start fallin out. There were doors where we could hear those awful chimes…the ones that

set your teeth on edge.”

“Todash chimes.”

“Yep. Andthings behind some of em. Slithery things. Was it you or was it Mia who told

me there are monsters in the todash darkness?”

“I might have,” he said. Gods knew there were.

“There are things in that crack beyond town, too. Was Mia told me that. ‘Monsters that

cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape,’ she said. And then Ted, Dinky, Dani, and Fred

joined hands. They made what Ted called ‘the little good-mind.’ I could feel it even though

I wasn’t in their circle, and I wasglad to feel it, because that’s one spooky old place down

there.” She clutched her blankets more tightly. “I don’t look forward to going again.”

“But you believe we have to.”

“There’s a passage that goes deep under the castle and comes out on the other side, in the

Discordia. Ted and his friends located it by picking up old thoughts, what Ted called

ghost-thoughts. Fred had a piece of chalk in his pocket and he marked it for me, but it’ll

still be hard to find again. What it’s like down there is the labyrinth in an old Greek story where this bull-monster was supposed to run. Iguess we can find it again…”

Roland bent and stroked Oy’s rough fur. “We’ll find it. This fella will backtrail your scent.

Won’t you, Oy?”

Oy looked up at him with his gold-ringed eyes but said nothing.

“Anyway,” she went on, “Ted and the others touched the minds of the things that live in

that crack outside of town. They didn’t mean to, but they did. Those things are neither for

the Crimson King nor against him, they’re only for themselves, but theythink . And they’re

telepathic. They knew we were there, and once the contact was made, they were glad to palaver. Ted and his friends said that they’ve been tunneling their way toward the

catacombs under the Experimental Station for a long long time, and now they’re close to