The Dark Tower - Stephen King [240]
The gunslinger looked at her, not understanding.
“He cut it on a piece of broken glass during the fight to take Blue Heaven, and the air and dirt of that place was poison!” It was Detta who spat the last word, her accent so thick that the gunslinger barely understood it: Pizen! “Goddam foot swole up…toes like sausages…then his cheeks and throat went all dusky, like a bruise…he took fever…” She pulled in a deep breath, clutching the two blankets she wore tighter around her. “He was delirious, but his head cleared at the end. He spoke of you, and of Susan Delgado. He spoke with such love and such regret…” She paused, then burst out: “We will go there, Roland, we will, and if it isn’t worth it, your Tower, somehow we’ll make it worth it!”
“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll find the Dark Tower, and nothing will stand against us, and before we go in, we’ll speak their names. All of the lost.”
“Your list will be longer than mine,” she said, “but mine will be long enough.”
To this Roland did not reply, but the robot huckster, perhaps startled out of its long sleep by the sound of their voices, did. “Girls, girls, girls!” it cried from inside the batwing doors of the Gaiety Bar and Grill. “Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell, who cares, they give, you tell, girls tell, you tell…” There was a pause and then the robot huckster shouted one final word—“SATISFACTION!”—and fell silent.
“By the gods, but this is a sad place,” he said. “We’ll stay the night and then see it no more.”
“At least the sun’s out, and that’s a relief after Thunderclap, but isn’t it cold!”
He nodded, then asked about the others.
“They’ve gone on,” she said, “but there was a minute there when I didn’t think any of us were going anywhere except to the bottom of yonder crevasse.”
She pointed to the end of the Fedic high street furthest from the castle wall.
“There are TV screens that still work in some of the traincars, and as we came up on town we got a fine view of the bridge that’s gone. We could see the ends sticking out over the hole, but the gap in the middle had to be a hundred yards across. Maybe more. We could see the train trestle, too. That was still intact. The train was slowing down by then, but not enough so any of us could have jumped off. By then there was no time. And the jump would likely have killed anyone who tried. We were going, oh I’m gonna say fifty miles an hour. And as soon as we were on the trestle, the fucking thing started to creak and groan. Or to queel and grale, if you’ve ever read your James Thurber, which I suppose you have not. The train was playing music. Like Blaine did, do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“But we could hear the trestle getting ready to let go even over that. Then everything started shaking from side to side. A voice—very calm and soothing—said, ‘We are experiencing minor difficulties, please take your seats.’ Dinky was holding that little Russian girl, Dani. Ted took my hands and said, ‘I want to tell you, madam, that it has been a pleasure to know you.’ There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my seat—would have, if Ted hadn’t been holding onto me—and I thought ‘That’s it, we’re gone, please God let me be dead before whatever’s down there gets its teeth into me,’ and for a second or two we were going backward. Backward, Roland! I could see the whole car—we were in the first one behind the loco—tilting up. There was the sound of tearing metal. Then the good old Spirit of Topeka put on a burst of speed. Say what you want to about the old people, I know they got a lot of things wrong, but they built machines that had some balls.
“The next thing I knew, we were coasting into the station. And here comes that same soothing voice, this time telling us to look around our seats and make sure we’ve got all our personals—our gunna, you ken. Like we were on a damn TWA flight landing at Idlewild! It wasn’t until we were out on the platform that we saw the last nine cars of the train were gone. Thank God they were all empty.” She cast a baleful (but frightened)