Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Chapter VIII:

Notes from

the Gingerbread House

One

Eddie looked at the others. Jake and Roland were sitting on the sleeping-bags which had

been left for them. Oy lay curled up at Jake’s feet. Susannah was parked comfortably on the

seat of her Cruisin Trike. Eddie nodded, satisfied, and pushed the tape recorder’sPLAY

button. The reels spun…there was silence…they spun…and silence…then, after clearing

his throat, Ted Brautigan began to speak. They listened for over four hours, Eddie

replacing each empty reel with the next full one, not bothering to rewind.

No one suggested they stop, certainly not Roland, who listened with silent fascination

even when his hip began to throb again. Roland thought he understood more, now;

certainly he knew they had a real chance to stop what was happening in the compound

below them. The knowledge frightened him because their chances of success were slim.

The feeling of ka-shume made that clear. And one did not really understand the stakes until

one glimpsed the goddess in her white robe, the bitch-goddess whose sleeve fell back to

reveal her comely white arm as she beckoned:Come to me, run to me. Yes, it’s possible,

you may gain your goal, you may win, so run to me, give me your whole heart. And if I

break it? If one of you falls short, falls into the pit of coffah (the place your new friends call hell)? Too bad for you.

Yes, if one of them fell into coffah and burned within sight of the fountains, that would be

too bad, indeed. And the bitch in the white robe? Why, she’d only put her hands on her hips,

and throw back her head, and laugh as the world ended. So much depended on the man

whose weary, rational voice now filled the cave. The Dark Tower itself depended on him,

for Brautigan was a man of staggering powers.

The surprising thing was that the same could be said of Sheemie.

Two

“Test, one two…test, one two…test, test, test. This is Ted Stevens Brautigan and this is a

test…”

A brief pause. The reels turned, one full, the other now beginning to fill.

“Okay, good. Great, in fact. I wasn’t sure this thing would work, especially here, but it

seems fine. I prepared for this by trying to imagine you four—five, counting the boy’s little friend—listening to me, because I’ve always found visualization an excellent technique

when preparing some sort of presentation. Unfortunately, in this case it doesn’t work.

Sheemie can send me very good mental pictures—brilliant ones, in fact—but Roland is the

only one of you he’s actually seen, and him not since the fall of Gilead, when both of them

were very young. No disrespect, fellows, but I suspect the Roland now coming toward

Thunderclap looks hardly anything like the young man my friend Sheemie so worshipped.

“Where are you now, Roland? In Maine, looking for the writer? The one who also created

me, after a fashion? In New York, looking for Eddie’s wife? Are any of you even still alive?

I know the chances of you reaching Thunderclap aren’t good; ka is drawing you to the

Devar-Toi, but a very powerful anti-ka, set in motion by the one you call the Crimson King,

is working against you and your tet in a thousand ways. All the same…

“Was it Emily Dickinson who called hope the thing with feathers? I can’t remember.

There are a great many things I can’t remember any longer, but it seems I still remember

how to fight. Maybe that’s a good thing. Ihope it’s a good thing.

“Has it crossed your mind to wonder where I’m recording this, lady and gentlemen?”

It hadn’t. They simply sat, mesmerized by the slightly dusty sound of Brautigan’s voice,

passing a bottle of Perrier and a tin filled with graham crackers back and forth.

“I’ll tell you,” Brautigan went on, “partly because the three of you from America will

surely find it amusing, but mostly because you may find it useful in formulating a plan to

destroy what’s going on in Algul Siento.

“As I speak, I’m sitting on a chair made of slab chocolate. The seat is a big blue

marshmallow, and I doubt if the air mattresses we’re planning to leave you could be any

more comfortable. You’d think such a seat would be sticky, but it’s not. The walls of this

room—and the kitchen I can see if I look through the gumdrop arch to my left—are made

of green, yellow, and red candy. Lick the green one and you taste lime. Lick the red one and

you taste raspberry. Although taste (in any sense of that slippery word) had very little to do with Sheemie’s choices, or so I believe; I think he simply has a child’s love of bright

primary colors.”

Roland was nodding and smiling a little.

“Although I must tell you,” the voice from the tape recorder said dryly, “I’d be happy to

have at least one room with a slightly more reserved décor. Something in blue, perhaps.

Earth-tones would be even better.

“Speaking of earth tones, the stairs are also chocolate. The banister’s a candy-cane. One

cannot, however, say ‘the stairs going up to the second floor,’ because thereis no second

floor. Through the window you can see cars that look suspiciously like bonbons going by,

and the street itself looks like licorice. But if you open the door and take more than a single step toward Twizzler Avenue, you find yourself back where you started. In what we may as

well call ‘the real world,’ for want of a better term.

“Gingerbread House—which is what we call it because that’s what you always smell in

here, warm gingerbread, just out of the oven—is as much Dinky’s creation as it is

Sheemie’s. Dink wound up in the Corbett House dorm with Sheemie, and heard Sheemie

crying himself to sleep one night. A lot of people would have passed by on the other side in

a case like that, and I realize that no one in the world looks less like the Good Samaritan

than Dinky Earnshaw, but instead of passing by he knocked on the door of Sheemie’s suite

and asked if he could come in.

“Ask him about it now and Dinky will tell you it was no big deal. ‘I was new in the place,

I was lonely, I wanted to make some friends,’ he’ll say. ‘Hearing a guy bawling like that, it hit me thathe might want a friend, too.’ As though it were the most natural thing in the

world. In a lot of places that might be true, but not in Algul Siento. And you need to

understand that above all else, I think, if you’re going to understandus . So forgive me if I seem to dwell on the point.

“Some of the hume guards call us morks, after a space alien in some television comedy.

And morks are the most selfish people on Earth. Antisocial? Not exactly. Some

areextremely social, but only insofar as it will get them what they currently want or need.

Very few morks are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are morks, if you understand what I’m

saying. The most famous, and thank God the low men never brought him over here, was a

mass murderer named Ted Bundy.

“If you have an extra cigarette or two, no one can be more sympathetic—or

admiring—than a mork in need of a smoke. Once he’s got it, though, he’s gone.

“Most morks—I’m talking ninety-eight or -nine out of a hundred—would have heard

crying behind that closed door and never so much as slowed down on their way to

wherever. Dinky knocked and asked if he could come in, even though he was new in the

place and justifiably confused (he also thought he was going to be punished for murdering

his previous boss, but that’s a story for another day).

“And we should look at Sheemie’s side of it. Once again, I’d say ninety-eight or even

ninety-nine morks out of a hundred would have responded to a question like that by

shouting ‘Get lost!’ or even ‘Fuck off!’ Why? Because we are exquisitely aware that we’re

different from most people, and that it’s a difference most people don’t like. Any more than

the Neanderthals liked the first Cro-Magnons in the neighborhood, I would imagine.

Morks don’t like to be caught off-guard.”

A pause. The reels spun. All four of them could sense Brautigan thinking hard.

“No, that’s not quite right,” he said at last. “What morks don’t like is to be caught in an

emotionally vulnerable state. Angry, happy, in tears or fits of hysterical laughter, anything like that. It would be like you fellows going into a dangerous situation without your guns.

“For a long time, I was alone here. I was a mork who cared, whether I liked it or not. Then

there was Sheemie, brave enough to accept comfort if comfort was offered. And Dink, who