Stephen King – The Dark Tower

slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn’t remember a

single other instance when—

But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis movie.Dopes at Sea, or something

like that. She’d been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the

laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become self-feeding. The whole

audience—at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew—doing the same, rocking and

rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their

own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at

sea. But it had only happened that once.

Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there’s no tragedy here, is there?

She didn’t expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.

Not yet, there isn’t.

For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy.

Did thefolken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like

Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his

(take my horse…please)

routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.

What in the hell’s wrong with you, woman?

In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter.

Odd’s Lane, Odd Lane…think about it.

What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same

thing, only without the—

“Whoa-back, wait a minute,” she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really,

and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talking—pretty much nonstop, it sounded

like—and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening? The

cellar-dweller, if there really was one?

“Whoa-on a minute, just wait.”

She closed her eyes and once more saw the two street-signs on their pole, signs that were

actually a little below the pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a

snowbank nine feet high.TOWER ROAD , one of the signs had read—that one pointing to

the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The other, the one indicating the short

lane with the cottages on it, had saidODD’S LANE , only…

“Only itdidn’t, ” she murmured, clenching the hand that wasn’t holding the note into a fist.

“Itdidn’t. ”

She could see it clearly enough in her mind’s eye:ODD’S LANE , with the apostrophe and

theS added, and why would somebody do that? Was the sign-changer maybe a compulsive

neatnik who couldn’t stand—

What? Couldn’t stand what?

Beyond the closed bathroom door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over

and broke.He’s not used to laughing like that, Susannah thought.You best look out, Roland,

or you’ll do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something.

Think about it,her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there

something about the wordsodd andlane that someone didn’t want them to see? If so, that

person had no need to worry, because she sure wasn’t seeing it. She wished Eddie was here.

Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff: jokes and riddles and…an…

Her breath stopped. An expression of wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn her face,

and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of

mental rearrangements that she now had to—

Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waist-high washstand and blew on the

mirror, fogging it. She printedODD LANE. Looked at it with growing understanding and

dismay. In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what

she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn’t merry. It was jagged

and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the

way thefolken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The wayfolken laughed in hell.

BelowODD LANE she used the tip of her finger to printDANDELO, the anagram Eddie

might have seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostrophe-Son the sign had

been added to distract them.

In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming

instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland—

Roland was choking.

Chapter VI:

Patrick Danville

One

She wasn’t wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-Z-Boy recliner when they’d

returned to the living room after dinner, and she’d put the revolver on the magazine-littered end-table beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells. The shells were in her pocket.

Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland

was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color.

He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing. Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair—that baby-fine, shoulder-length white

hair—was now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased.

Instead of ten years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger.

The son of a bitch.

Thevampire son of a bitch.

Oy leaped at him and seized Joe’s left leg just above the knee. “Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen,hike !” Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew

through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR

HOME to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.

“What I think,” he said, “is that women need a reason to have sex.” Joe put one foot on

Roland’s chest—like a big-game hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. “Men, on the

other hand, only need aplace ! Bing!” He popped his eyes. “The thing about sex is that God

gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a—”

He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-Z-Boy in order to gain the

necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah

laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck

the side of Joe’s head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone,

however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating.

Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose,

exposing his teeth—perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn’t the sort of vampire

who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was

changing: darkening, contracting, turning into something that was no longer human. It was

the face of a psychotic clown.

“You,” he said, but before he could say anything else, Oy had raced forward again. There

was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering.

Oy crouched behind the thing’s ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing

abruptly when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag

rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once,

looking around groggily.

Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized

his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out.

Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo’s

shadow fell over them.

“You bitch, I’ll teach you to interrupt a man when he’s on a—”

“Roland, let it go!” she screamed, and he did.

Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an

instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the

torturedOwuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She

raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one

undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which

were empty. Of course they were, it wasn’t his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his

features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface things—not features at all but markings on some animal’s hide or an insect’s carapace.

“Stop!” he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a

cicada’s buzz. “I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!”

“Heard it,” she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from

just above what had been his right eye.

Two

Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When