The Dark Tower - Stephen King [125]
Exponentially stronger.
“But that’s ahead of my story,” he said.
He moved from town to town, a hobo who rode the rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And in retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being watched. It was an intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. He became aware of a certain kind of people, for instance. A few were women, most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their clothing. Their faces were oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive. It was a look he much later came to associate with dumbbells who’d gotten plastic surgery from quack doctors. During that same twenty-year period—but once again not consciously, only in the corner of his mind’s eye—he became aware that no matter what city he was in, those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and stoops and sidewalks. Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons. Sometimes a red eye. There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but not always. Later on, he said, it all fit together in a crazy sort of way, but not back in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting. No, back then he’d been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not wanting to see what was right in front of him, because it was…disturbing.
And then, right around the time Korea was winding down, he saw The Ad. It promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if you were THE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED. A number of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it in the Sacramento Bee.
“Holy crap!” Jake cried. “That’s the same paper Pere Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder—”
“Hush,” Roland said. “Listen.”
They listened.
Six
The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few weeks—not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algul). The interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly the masks they wear, are not good, not when you’re up close and personal. Up close and personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their becoming with a religious fervor. The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug with a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads—the Eye of the King—usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’s snot-gutters?
Whatever they think, up close and personal there’s something definitely wrong with them even when they’re America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s properly in place. So it’s humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they find it demeaning, like “nigger” or “vamp”) at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.
Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks (wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing—a ninety-minute