Stephen King – The Dark Tower

an old man, sai Deschain, but if you would…?”

Roland climbed the ladder resting a-tilt against the edge of the loft floor and tossed down

hay until Collins told him it was good, plenty enough to last Lippy through even four days’

worth of blow. (“For she don’t eat worth what’chee might call a Polish fuck, as you can see

lookin at her,” he said.) Then the gunslinger came back down and Collins led them along

the short back walk to his cottage. The snow piled on either side was as high as Roland’s

head.

“Be it ever so humble, et cet’ra,” Joe said, and ushered them into his kitchen. It was

paneled in knotty pine which was actually plastic, Susannah saw when she got closer. And

it was delightfully warm. The name on the electric stove was Rossco, a brand she’d never

heard of. The fridge was an Amana and had a special little door set into the front, above the handle. She leaned closer and saw the wordsMAGIC ICE . “This thing makes ice cubes?”

she asked, delighted.

“Well, no, not exactly,” Joe said. “It’s thefreezer that makes em, beauty; that thing on the

front just drops em into your drink.”

This struck her funny, and she laughed. She looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with

his old fiendish grin, and that made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell

of the kitchen was wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice.

Roland was looking up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. “Yar, yar, I got all

the ’lectric,” he said. “Hot-air furnace, too, ain’t it nice? And nobody ever sends me a bill!

The genny’s in a shed round to t’other side. It’s a Honda, and quiet as Sunday morning!

Even when you get right up on top of its little shed, you don’t hear nuffink butmmmmmm .

Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it needs maintaining, which hasn’t been but twice in all the time I’ve been here. Nawp, Joey’s lyin,

he’ll soon be dyin. Three times, it’s been. Three in all.”

“Who’s Stuttering Bill?” Susannah asked, just as Roland was asking “How long have you

been here?”

Joe Collins laughed. “One at a time, me foine new friends, one at a time!” He had set his

stick aside to struggle out of his coat, put his weight on his bad leg, made a low snarling

sound, and nearly fell over.Would have fallen over, had Roland not steadied him.

“Thankee, thankee, thankee,” Joe said. “Although I tell you what, it wouldn’t have been

the first time I wound up with my nose on that lernoleum! But, as you saved me a tumble,

it’s your question I’ll answer first. I’ve been here, Odd Joe of Odd’s Lane, just about

seb’nteen years. The only reason I can’t tell you bang-on is that for awhile there, time got

pretty goddam funny, if you know what I mean.”

“We do,” Susannah said. “Believe me, we do.”

Collins was now divesting himself of a sweater, and beneath it was another. Susannah’s

first impression had been of a stout old man who stopped just short of fat. Now she saw that

a lot of what she’d taken for fat was nothing but padding. He wasn’t as desperately scrawny

as his old horse, but he was a long shout from stout.

“Now Stuttering Bill,” the old man continued, removing the second sweater, “he be a

robot. Cleans the house as well as keepin my generator runnin…and a-course he’s the one

that does the plowin. When I first come here, he only stuttered once in awhile; now it’s

every second or third word. What I’ll do when he finally runs down I dunno.” To

Susannah’s ear, he sounded singularly unworried about it.

“Maybe he’ll get better, now that the Beam’s working right again,” she said.

“He might last a littlelonger, but I doubt like hell that he’ll get anybetter, ” Joe said.

“Machines don’t heal the way living things do.” He’d finally reached his thermal

undershirt, and here the stripdown stopped. Susannah was grateful. Looking at the

somehow ghastly barrel of the horse’s ribs, so close beneath the short gray fur, had been

enough. She had no wish to see the master’s, as well.

“Off with yer coats and your leggings,” Joe said. “I’ll get yez eggnog or whatever else

ye’d like in a minute or two, but first I’d show yer my livin room, for it’s my pride, so it is.”

Six

There was a rag rug on the living room floor that would have looked at home in Gramma

Holmes’s house, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a table beside it. The table was heaped with

magazines, paperback books, a pair of spectacles, and a brown bottle containing God knew

what sort of medicine. There was a television, although Susannah couldn’t imagine what old Joe might possibly watch on it (Eddie and Jake would have recognized the VCR sitting

on the shelf beneath). But what took all of Susannah’s attention—and Roland’s, as

well—was the photograph on one of the walls. It had been thumbtacked there slightly

askew, in a casual fashion that seemed (to Susannah, at least) almost sacrilegious.

It was a photograph of the Dark Tower.

Her breath deserted her. She worked her way over to it, barely feeling the knots and

nubbles of the rag rug beneath her palms, then raised her arms. “Roland, pick me up!”

He did, and she saw that his face had gone dead pale except for two hard balls of color

burning in his thin cheeks. His eyes were blazing. The Tower stood against the darkening

sky with sunset painting the hills behind it orange, the slitted windows rising in their

eternal spiral. From some of those windows there spilled a dim and eldritch glow. She

could see balconies jutting out from the dark stone sides at every two or three stories, and

the squat doors that opened onto them, all shut. Locked as well, she had no doubt. Before

the Tower was the field of roses, Can’-Ka No Rey, dim but still lovely in the shadows.

Most of the roses were closed against the coming dark but a few still peeped out like sleepy

eyes.

“Joe!” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper. She felt faint, and it seemed she

could hear singing voices, far and wee. “Oh, Joe! Thispicture… !”

“Aye, mum,” he said, clearly pleased by her reaction. “It’s a good ’un, ain’t it? Which is

why I pinned it up. I’ve got others, but this is the best. Right at sunset, so the shadow seems to lie forever back along the Path of the Beam. Which in a way it does, as I’m sure ye both

must know.”

Roland’s breathing in her right ear was rapid and ragged, as if he’d just run a race, but

Susannah barely noticed. For it was not just thesubject of the picture that had filled her with awe.

“This is aPolaroid! ”

“Well…yar,” he said, sounding puzzled at the level of her excitement. “I suppose

Stuttering Bill could have brung me a Kodak if I’d ast for one, but how would I ever have

gotten the fillum developed? And by the time I thought of a video camera—for the gadget

under the TV’d play such things—I was too old to go back, and yonder nag ’uz too old to

carry me. Yet I would if I could, for it’s lovely there, a place of warm-hearted ghosts. I

heard the singing voices of friends long gone; my Ma and Pa, too. I allus—”

A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made Susannah dizzy. “You’ve been there?” he

asked. “You’ve been to the Dark Tower?”

“Indeed I have,” said the old man. “For who else do ye think took that pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?”

“Whendid you take it?”

“That’s from my last trip,” he said. “Two year ago, in the summer—although that’s lower

land, ye must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I’ve never seen it.”

“How long from here?”

Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn’t take him long, but to Roland and Susannah

itseemed long, very long indeed. Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in

protest at the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to

twist and dance.

“Well,” he said, “ye’re on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill keeps Tower Road

plowed for as far as ye’d go; what else does the old whatchamacallit have to do with his

time? O’ course ye’ll want to wait here until this new nor’east jeezer blows itself out—”

“How long once we’re on the move?” Roland asked.

“Rarin t’go, ain’tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for if you’ve come from In-World ye