Stephen King – The Dark Tower

argue or question any more, I just went for it. I wasn’t completely sure I could go through

into that other world, but I’d reached a point where I hardly even cared. I thought dying

might be the best thing I could do. It would slow them down, at least.

“And just before I took the plunge, Sheemie thought to me, ‘Look for my friend Will

Dearborn. His real name is Roland. His friends are dead, but I know he’s not, because I can

hear him. He’s a gunslinger, and he has new friends. Bring them here and they’ll make the

bad folks stop hurting the Beam, the way he made Jonas and his friends stop when they

were going to kill me.’ For Sheemie, this was a sermon.

“I closed my eyes and went through. There was a brief sensation of being turned on my

head, but that was all. No chimes, no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared to the Santa Mira doorway. I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy highway. There was

a piece of newspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked it up and saw I’d landed in

April of 1960, almost five years after Armitage and his friends herded us through the door

in Santa Mira, on the other side of the country. I was looking at a piece of the HartfordCourant, you see. And the road turned out to be the Merritt Parkway.”

“Sheemie can make magic doors!” Roland cried. He had been cleaning his revolver as he

listened, but now he put it aside. “That’s what teleporting is!That’s what it means! ”

“Hush, Roland,” Susannah said. “This must be his Connecticut adventure. I want to hear

this part.”

Eleven

But none of them hear about Ted’s Connecticut adventure. He simply calls it “a story for

another day” and tells his listeners that he was caught in Bridgeport while trying to

accumulate enough cash to disappear permanently. The low men bundled him into a car,

drove him to New York, and took him to a ribjoint called the Dixie Pig. From there to Fedic,

and from Fedic to Thunderclap Station; from the station right back to the Devar-Toi, oh

Ted, so good to see you, welcome back.

The fourth tape is now three-quarters done, and Ted’s voice is little more than a croak.

Nevertheless, he gamely pushes on.

“I hadn’t been gone long, but over here time had taken one of its erratic slips forward.

Humma o’ Tego was out, possibly because of me, and Prentiss of New Jersey, the ki’-dam,

was in. He and Finli interrogated me in the Master’s suite a good many times. There was no

physical torture—I guess they still reckoned me too important to chance spoiling me—but

there was a lot of discomfort and plenty of mind-games. They also made it clear that if I

tried to run again, my Connecticut friends would be put to death. I said, ‘Don’t you boys

get it? If I keep doing my job, they’re going out, anyway.Everybody’sgoing out, with the

possible exception of the one you call the Crimson King.’

“Prentiss steepled his fingers in the annoying way he has and said, ‘That may be or may

not be true, sai, but if it is,wewon’t suffer when we “go out,” as you put it. Little Bobby and little Carol, on the other hand…not to mention Carol’s mother and Bobby’s friend,

Sully-John…’ He didn’t have to finish. I still wonder if they knew how terribly frightened

they’d made me with that threat against my young friends. And how terribly angry.

“All their questions came down to two things they really wanted to know: Why had I run,

and who helped me do it. I could have fallen back on the old name–rank–serial number

routine, but decided to chance being a bit more expansive. I’d wanted to run, I said,

because I’d gotten a glimmering from some of the can-toi guards about what we were

really doing, and I didn’t like the idea. As for how I’d gotten out, I told them I didn’t know.

I went to sleep one night, I said, and just woke up beside the Merritt Parkway. They went

from scoffing at this story to semi-believing it, mostly because I never varied it a single jot or tittle, no matter how many times they asked. And of course they already knew how

powerful I was, and in ways that were different from the others.

“ ‘Do you think you’re a teleport in some subconscious way, sai?’ Finli asked me.

“ ‘How could I say?’ I asked in turn—always answer a question with a question is a good

rule to follow during interrogation, I think, as long as it’s a relatively soft interrogation, as this one was. ‘I’ve never sensed any such ability, but of course we don’t always know

what’s lurking in our subconscious, do we?’

“ ‘You better hope it wasn’t you,’ Prentiss said. ‘We can live with almost any wild talent

around here except that one. That one, Mr. Brautigan, would spell the end even for such a

valued employee as yourself.’ I wasn’t sure I believed that, but later Trampas gave me

reason to think Prentiss might have been telling the truth. Anyway, that was my story and I

never went beyond it.

“Prentiss’s houseboy, a fellow named Tassa—a hume, if it matters—would bring in

cookies and cans of Nozz-A-La—which I like because it tastes a bit like root beer—and

Prentiss would offer me all I wanted…after, that was, I told them where I’d gotten my

information and how I’d escaped Algul Siento. Then the whole round of questions would

start again, only this time with Prentiss and the Wease munching cookies and drinking

Nozzie. But at some point they’d always give in and allow me a drink and a bite to eat. As

interrogators, I’m afraid there just wasn’t enough Nazi in them to make me give up my

secrets. They tried to prog me, of course, but…have you heard that old saying about never

bullshitting a bullshitter?”

Eddie and Susannah both nod. So does Jake, who has heard his father say that during

numerous conversations concerning Programming at the Network.

“I bet you have,” Ted resumes. “Well, it’s also fair to say that you can’t prog a progger, at least not one who’s gone beyond a certain level of understanding. And I’d better get to the

point before my voice gives out entirely.

“One day about three weeks after the low men hauled me back, Trampas approached me

on Main Street in Pleasantville. By then I’d met Dinky, had identified him as a kindred

spirit, and was, with his help, getting to know Sheemie better. A lot was going on in

addition to my daily interrogations in Warden’s House. I’d hardly even thought about

Trampas since returning, but he’d thought of little else than me. As I quickly found out.

“ ‘I know the answers to the questions they keep asking you,’ he said. ‘What Idon’tknow is

why you haven’t given me up.’

“I said the idea had never crossed my mind—that tattle-taleing wasn’t the way I’d been

raised to do things. And besides, it wasn’t as if they were putting an electrified cattle-prod up my rectum or pulling my fingernails…although they might have resorted to such

techniques, had it been anyone other than me. The worst they’d done was to make me look

at the plate of cookies on Prentiss’s desk for an hour and a half before relenting and letting me have one.

“ ‘I was angry at you at first,’ Trampas said, ‘but then I realized—reluctantly—that I might have done the same thing in your place. The first week you were back I didn’t sleep much,

I can tell you. I’d lie on my bed there in Damli, expecting them to come for me at any

minute. You know what they’d do if they found out it was me, don’t you?’

“I told him I did not. He said that he’d be flogged by Gaskie, Finli’s Second, and then sent

raw-backed into the wastes, either to die in the Discordia or to find service in the castle of the Red King. But such a trip would not be easy. Southeast of Fedic one may also contract

such things as the Eating Sickness (probably cancer, but a kind that’s very fast, very

painful, and very nasty) or what they just call the Crazy. The Children of Roderick

commonly suffer from both these problems, and others, as well. The minor skin diseases of

Thunderclap—the eczema, pimples, and rashes—are apparently only the beginning of

one’s problems in End-World. But for an exile, service in the Court of the Crimson King

would be the only hope. Certainly a can-toi such as Trampas couldn’t go to the Callas.

They’re closer, granted, and there’s genuine sunshine there, but you can imagine what

would happen to low men or the taheen in the Arc of the Callas.”