Stephen King – The Dark Tower

held his throw in spite of the voice in his head that was yammering for him to go on, go on

and do it, give the bastard what he’d once heard Margaret Eisenhart refer to as a “deep

haircut.” This term had made the other Sisters of the Plate laugh hard. Yet as much as he

wanted to throw, he held his hand.

What he saw was a young man whose skin was a pallid yellowish-gray under the brilliant

kitchen lights. He looked both terrified and malnourished. Jake raised the plate in warning

and the young man stopped. It wasn’t the ’Riza he was looking at, however, but Oy, who

stood between Jake’s feet. The bumbler’s fur was bushed out around his body, seeming to

double his size, and his teeth were bared.

“Do you—” Jake began, and then the door to the restaurant burst open. One of the low men

rushed in. Jake threw the plate without hesitation. It moaned through the steamy, brilliant

air and took off the intruder’s head with gory precision just above the Adam’s apple. The

headless body bucked first to the left and then to the right, like a stage comic accepting a

round of applause with a whimsical move, and then collapsed.

Jake had another plate in each hand almost immediately, his arms once more crossed over

his chest in the position sai Eisenhart called “the load.” He looked at the washerboy, who

was still holding the knife and the cleaver. Without much threat, however, Jake thought. He

tried again and this time got the whole question out. “Do you speak English?”

“Yar,” the boy said. He dropped the cleaver so he could hold one water-reddened thumb and its matching forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “Bout just a liddle. I learn since I come over here.” He opened his other hand and the knife joined the cleaver on the kitchen

floor.

“Do you come from Mid-World?” Jake asked. “You do, don’t you?”

He didn’t think the washerboy was terribly bright (“No quiz-kid,” Elmer Chambers would

no doubt have sneered), but he was at least smart enough to be homesick; in spite of his

terror, Jake saw an unmistakable flash of that look in the boy’s eyes. “Yar,” he said. “Come

from Ludweg, me.”

“Near the city of Lud?”

“North of there, if you do like it or if you don’t,” said the washerboy. “Will’ee kill me, lad?

I don’t want to die, sad as I am.”

“I won’t be the one to kill you if you tell me the truth. Did a woman come through here?”

The washerboy hesitated, then said: “Aye. Sayre and his closies had ’er. She ’us out on her

feet, that ’un, head all lollin…” He demonstrated, rolling his head on his neck and looking

more like the village idiot than ever. Jake thought of Sheemie in Roland’s tale of his Mejis

days.

“But not dead.”

“Nar. I hurt her breevin, me.”

Jake looked toward the door, but no one came through. Yet. He should go, but—

“What’s your name, cully?”

“Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa.”

“Well, listen, Jochabim, there’s a world outside this kitchen called New York City, and

pubes like you are free. I suggest you get out while you have an opportunity.”

“They’d just bring me back and stripe me.”

“No, you don’t understand how big it is. Like Lud when Lud was—”

He looked at Jochabim’s dull-eyed face and thought,No, I’m the one who doesn’t

understand. And if I hang around here trying to convince him to desert, I’ll no doubt get

just what I —

The door leading to the restaurant popped open again. This time two low men tried to come through at once and momentarily jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. Jake threw

both of his plates and watched them crisscross in the steamy air, beheading both

newcomers just as they burst through. They fell backward and once more the door swung

shut. At Piper School Jake had learned about the Battle of Thermopylae, where the Greeks

had held off a Persian army that had outnumbered them ten to one. The Greeks had drawn

the Persians into a narrow mountain pass; he had this kitchen door. As long as they kept

coming through by ones and twos—as they must unless they could flank him

somehow—he could pick them off.

At least until he ran out of Orizas.

“Guns?” he asked Jochabim. “Are there guns here?”

Jochabim shook his head, but given the young man’s irritating look of density, it was hard

to tell if this meantNo guns in the kitchen orI don’t ken you .

“All right, I’m going,” he said. “And if you don’t go yourself while you’ve got a chance,

Jochabim, you’re an even bigger fool than you look. Which would be saying a lot. There

arevideo games out there, kid—think about it.”

Jochabim continued giving Jake theduh look, however, and Jake gave up. He was about to

speak to Oy when someone spoke to him through the door.

“Hey, kid.” Rough. Confidential. Knowing. The voice of a man who could hit you for five

or sleep with your girlfriend any time he liked, Jake thought. “Your friend the faddah’s

dead. In fact, the faddah’sdinnah . You come out now, with no more nonsense, maybe you

can avoid being dessert.”

“Turn it sideways and stick it up your ass,” Jake called. This got through even Jochabim’s

wall of stupidity; he looked shocked.

“Last chance,” said the rough and knowing voice. “Come on out.”

“Come on in!” Jake countered. “I’ve got plenty of plates!” Indeed, he felt a lunatic urge to

rush forward, bang through the door, and take the battle to the low men and women in the

restaurant dining room on the other side. Nor was the idea all that crazy, as Roland himself

would have known; it was the last thing they’d expect, and there was at least an even

chance that he could panic them with half a dozen quickly thrown plates and start a rout.

The problem was the monsters that had been feeding behind the tapestry. The

vampires.They’d not panic, and Jake knew it. He had an idea that if the Grandfathers had

been able to come into the kitchen (or perhaps it was just lack of interest that kept them in the dining room—that and the last scraps of the Pere’s corpse), he would be dead already.

Jochabim as well, quite likely.

He dropped to one knee, murmured “Oy, find Susannah!” and reinforced the command with a quick mental picture.

The bumbler gave Jochabim a final distrustful look, then began to nose about on the floor.

The tiles were damp from a recent mopping, and Jake was afraid the bumbler wouldn’t be

able to find the scent. Then Oy gave a single sharp cry—more dog’s bark than human’s

word—and began to hurry down the center of the kitchen between the stoves and the steam

tables, nose low to the ground, only going out of his way long enough to skirt Chef

Warthog’s smoldering body.

“Listen, to me, you little bastard!” cried the low man outside the door. “I’m losing

patience with you!”

“Good!” Jake cried. “Come on in! Let’s see if you go back out again!”

He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture while looking at Jochabim. He was about

to turn and run—he had no idea how long it would be before the washerboy yelled through

the door that the kid and his billy-bumbler were no longer holding Thermopylae

Pass—when Jochabim spoke to him in a low voice that was little more than a whisper.

“What?” Jake asked, looking at him uncertainly. It sounded as if the kid had saidmind the

mind-trap, but that made no sense. Did it?

“Mind the mind-trap,” Jochabim said, this time much more clearly, and turned away to his

pots and sudsy water.

“Whatmind-trap?” Jake asked, but Jochabim affected not to hear and Jake couldn’t stay

long enough to cross-examine him. He ran to catch up with Oy, throwing glances back over

his shoulder. If a couple more of the low men burst into the kitchen, Jake wanted to be the

first to know.

But none did, at least not before he had followed Oy through another door and into the

restaurant’s pantry, a dim room stacked high with boxes and smelling of coffee and spices.

It was like the storeroom behind the East Stoneham General Store, only cleaner.

Two

There was a closed door in the corner of the Dixie Pig’s pantry. Beyond it was a tiled

stairway leading down God only knew how far. It was lit by low-wattage bulbs behind

bleary, fly-spotted glass shades. Oy started down without hesitation, descending with a

kind of bobbing, front-end/back-end regularity that was pretty comical. He kept his nose

pressed to the stairs, and Jake knew he was onto Susannah; he could pick it up from his

little friend’s mind.

Jake tried counting the stairs, made it as far as a hundred and twenty, then lost his grip on the numbers. He wondered if they were still in New York (or under it). Once he thought he