The Dark Tower - Stephen King [128]
“Armitage told me, ‘You’ll be traveling far, Ted, but it will also be right next door. And for the time being, that’s all I can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our arrangement during the eight weeks before you actually…mmm…ship out. Remember that loose lips sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are being watched.’
“And of course I was watched. Later—too later, in a manner of speaking—I was able to replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that the can-toi were watching me the whole time.
“The low men.”
Eight
“Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “I remember the date with perfect clarity; it was Halloween of 1955. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave Ittaway, Dick…I can’t remember his last name, he died about six months later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of the ki’cans backed him up—ki’can sort of means shit-people or shit-folken, if you’re interested—but it was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest…well, remember Doc Number Two? The rest were and are like him. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to know, sai, don’t mess up my worldview.’ Anyway, the last one was Tanya Leeds. Tough little thing…”
A pause and a click. Then Ted’s voice resumed, sounding temporarily refreshed. The third tape had almost finished. He must have really burned through the rest of the story, Eddie thought, and found that the idea disappointed him. Whatever else he was, Ted was a hell of a good tale-spinner.
“Armitage and his colleagues showed up in a Ford station wagon, what we called a woody in those charming days. They drove us inland, to a town called Santa Mira. There was a paved main street. The rest of them were dirt. I remember there were a lot of oil-derricks, looking like praying mantises, sort of…although it was dark by then and they were really just shapes against the sky.
“I was expecting a train depot, or maybe a bus with CHARTERED in the destination window. Instead we pulled up to this empty freight depot with a sign reading SANTA MIRA SHIPPING hanging askew on the front and I got a thought, clear as day, from Dick whatever-his-name was. They’re going to kill us, he was thinking. They brought us out here to kill us and steal our stuff.
“If you’re not a telepath, you don’t know how scary something like that can be. How the surety of it kind of…invades your head. I saw Dave Ittaway go pale, and although Tanya didn’t make a sound—she was a tough little thing, as I told you—it was bright enough in the car to see there were tears standing in the corners of her eyes.
“I leaned over her, took Dick’s hands in mine, and squeezed down on them when he tried to pull away. I thought at him, They didn’t give us a quarter of a mill each, most of it still stashed safe in the Seaman’s Bank, so they could bring us out to the williwags and steal our watches. And Jace thought at me, I don’t even have a watch. I pawned my Gruen two years ago in Albuquerque, and by the time I thought about buying another one—around midnight last night, this was—all the stores were closed and I was too drunk to climb down off the barstool I was on, anyway.
“That relaxed us, and we all had a laugh. Armitage asked us what we were laughing about and that relaxed us even more, because we had something they didn’t, could communicate in a way they couldn’t. I told him it was nothing, then gave Dick’s hands another little squeeze. It did the job. I…facilitated him, I suppose. It was my first time doing that. The first of many. That’s part of the reason I’m so tired; all that facilitating wears a man out.
“Armitage and the others led us inside. The place was deserted, but at the far end there was a door with two words chalked on it, along with those moons and stars. THUNDERCLAP STATION, it said. Well, there was no station: no tracks, no buses, no road other than the one we’d used to get there. There