The Dark Tower - Stephen King [300]
It was the wind, Susannah told herself. What else could it be?
Mordred, her mind whispered back. Mordred out there, freezing. Mordred out there dying while we sit in here with our hot coffee.
But she said nothing.
There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he’d been drinking pretty heavily (“Hitting it hard” was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. “Hell, I was on a roll,” he said. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I was knocking myself dead, rolling me in the aisles.”
Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club’s front window (Molotov cocktail was a term Roland understood), and before you could say Take my mother-in-law…please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the stage door. He’d almost made it to the street when three men (“all very black, all roughly the size of NBA centers”) grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung a bottle. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a deserted town called Stone’s Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors had gone home.
It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins’s story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake’s first entry into Mid-World, after being run over in the street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally implausible. But she still didn’t believe much of it. The question was, did it matter?
“You couldn’t call it heaven, because there were no clouds and no choirs of angels,” Joe said, “but I decided it was some sort of an afterlife, just the same.” He had wandered about. He found food, he found a horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands of people, some friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he’d picked up some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the Beams and the Tower. At one point he’d tried to cross the Badlands, he said, but he’d gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all sorts of sores and weird blemishes.
“I got a boil on my ass, and that was the final touch,” he said. “Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found this place, which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me. He’s got a little doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom.”
Roland wanted to know if Joe had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad creature made his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six months ago there had been a terrible storm (“a real boilermaker”) that drove him down into his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or no genny, and as he cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some terrible creature was close by, and that it might at any moment touch Joe’s mind and follow his thoughts to where he was hiding.
“You know what I felt like?” he asked them.
Roland and Susannah shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation.
“Snack-food,” Joe said. “Potential snack-food.”
This part of his story’s true, Susannah thought. He may have changed it around a little, but basically it’s true. And if she had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible.
“What did you do?” Roland asked.
“Went to sleep,” he said. “It’s a talent I’ve always had, like doing impressions—although I don’t do famous voices in my act, because they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless you’re Rich Little, at least. Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that’s what I did down in the cellar. When I woke up again the lights were