Stephen King – The Dark Tower

are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met .

During his recitation, an odd (and—to Susannah, at least—rather poignant) thing

happened. Joe Collins’s Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began

to cross-fade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American. She kept

expecting to hearbird come out of his mouth asboid, heard ashoid, but she guessed that was

only because she’d spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of

those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking

impressions that fade as quickly as they rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it

probablywas boid andhoid ; in Pittsburgh it would beburrd andhurrd ; the Giant Eagle

supermarket would becomeJaunt Iggle .

Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a court jester, and the old man

laughed heartily. “You got it. Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky

room with drinks in their hands instead of the king and his courtiers.”

Roland nodded, smiling.

“There are advantages to being a funnyman doing one-nighters in the Midwest, though,”

he said. “If you tank in Dubuque, all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes

instead of forty-five and then it’s on to the next town. There are probably places in

Mid-World where they’d cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint.”

At this the gunslinger burst out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle

Susannah (although she was laughing herself). “You say true, Joe.”

In the summer of 1972, Joe had been playing a nightclub called Jango’s in Cleveland, not

far from the ghetto. Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was.

“In the case of Hauck,” Susannah said, “it means a part of the city where most of the

people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their billyclubs first and

asking questions later.”

“Bing!” Joe exclaimed, and rapped his knuckles on the top of his head. “Couldn’t have

said it better myself!”

Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the house, but this time

the wind was in a relative lull. Susannah glanced at Roland, but if the gunslinger heard, he

gave no sign.

Itwasthe wind, Susannah told herself.What else couldit be?

Mordred,her mind whispered back.Mordred out there, freezing. Mordred out there dying

while we sit in here with our hot coffee.

But she said nothing.

There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he’d been drinking

pretty heavily (“Hitting it hard” was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. “Hell, I was on a roll,” he said.

“I don’t know about anyone else, but I was knockingmyself dead, rolling me in the aisles.”

Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club’s front window (Molotov

cocktailwas a term Roland understood), and before you could sayTake my

mother-in-law…please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the

stage door. He’d almost made it to the street when three men (“all very black, all roughly

the size of NBA centers”) grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung

a bottle. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a

deserted town called Stone’s Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along

Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors

had gone home.

It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins’s

story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake’s first entry into Mid-World, after

being run over in the street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally

implausible. But she still didn’t believe much of it. The question was, did it matter?

“You couldn’t call it heaven, because there were no clouds and no choirs of angels,” Joe

said, “but I decided it was some sort of an afterlife, just the same.” He had wandered about.

He found food, he found a horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands

of people, some friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he’d

picked up some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the

Beams and the Tower. At one point he’d tried to cross the Badlands, he said, but he’d

gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all sorts of sores and

weird blemishes.

“I got a boil on my ass, and that was the final touch,” he said. “Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found

this place, which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me. He’s got a little

doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom.”

Roland wanted to know if Joe had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad

creature made his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six

months ago there had been a terrible storm (“a real boilermaker”) that drove him down into

his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or no genny, and as he

cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some terrible creature was close by, and

that it might at any moment touch Joe’s mind and follow his thoughts to where he was

hiding.

“You know what I felt like?” he asked them.

Roland and Susannah shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation.

“Snack-food,” Joe said. “Potential snack-food.”

This part of his story’s true,Susannah thought.He may have changed it around a little, but

basically it’s true . And if she had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible.

“What did you do?” Roland asked.

“Went to sleep,” he said. “It’s a talent I’ve always had, like doing impressions—although

I don’t do famous voices in my act, because they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless

you’re Rich Little, at least. Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that’s what I did down in the cellar. When I woke up again the lights were back on and the…the

whatever-it-was was gone. I know about the Crimson King, of course, I see folks from time

to time still—nomads like you three, for the most part—and they talk about him. Usually they fork the sign of the evil eye and spit between their fingers when they do. You think

that was him, huh? You think the Crimson King actually passed by Odd’s Lane on his way

to the Tower.” Then, before they had a chance to answer: “Well, why not? Tower Road’s

the main throughfare, after all. It goes all the way there.”

You know it was him,Susannah thought.What game are you playing, Joe?

The thin cry that was most definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it

was Mordred, though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had

gone to hide from the Crimson King…or so he’d said. Who was down there now? And was

he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner?

“It hasn’t been a bad life,” Joe was saying. “Not the life I expected, not by any manner or

means, but I got a theory—the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more

often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger.”

Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, “You were a court jester and

the customers in these inns were your court.”

Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned. Had she seen his teeth before?

They had been doing a lot of laughing and sheshould have seen them, but she couldn’t

remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn’t have the mush-mouth sound of

someone whose teeth are mostly gone (such people had consulted with her father on many

occasions, most of them in search of artificial replacements). If she’d had to guess earlier

on, she would have said hehad teeth but they were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins,

and—

And what’s the matter with you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely

didn’t grow a fresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You’re letting your

imagination run away with you.