Stephen King - The Dark Tower

“Who’s Stuttering Bill?” Susannah asked, just as Roland was asking “How long have you been here?”

Joe Collins laughed. “One at a time, me foine new friends, one at a time!” He had set his stick aside to struggle out of his coat, put his weight on his bad leg, made a low snarling sound, and nearly fell over. Would have fallen over, had Roland not steadied him.

“Thankee, thankee, thankee,” Joe said. “Although I tell you what, it wouldn’t have been the first time I wound up with my nose on that lernoleum! But, as you saved me a tumble, it’s your question I’ll answer first. I’ve been here, Odd Joe of Odd’s Lane, just about seb’nteen years. The only reason I can’t tell you bang-on is that for awhile there, time got pretty goddam funny, if you know what I mean.”

“We do,” Susannah said. “Believe me, we do.”

Collins was now divesting himself of a sweater, and beneath it was another. Susannah’s first impression had been of a stout old man who stopped just short of fat. Now she saw that a lot of what she’d taken for fat was nothing but padding. He wasn’t as desperately scrawny as his old horse, but he was a long shout from stout.

“Now Stuttering Bill,” the old man continued, removing the second sweater, “he be a robot. Cleans the house as well as keepin my generator runnin…and a-course he’s the one that does the plowin. When I first come here, he only stuttered once in awhile; now it’s every second or third word. What I’ll do when he finally runs down I dunno.” To Susannah’s ear, he sounded singularly unworried about it.

“Maybe he’ll get better, now that the Beam’s working right again,” she said.

“He might last a little longer, but I doubt like hell that he’ll get any better, ” Joe said. “Machines don’t heal the way living things do.” He’d finally reached his thermal undershirt, and here the stripdown stopped. Susannah was grateful. Looking at the somehow ghastly barrel of the horse’s ribs, so close beneath the short gray fur, had been enough. She had no wish to see the master’s, as well.

“Off with yer coats and your leggings,” Joe said. “I’ll get yez eggnog or whatever else ye’d like in a minute or two, but first I’d show yer my livin room, for it’s my pride, so it is.”

There was a rag rug on the living room floor that would have looked at home in Gramma Holmes’s house, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a table beside it. The table was heaped with magazines, paperback books, a pair of spectacles, and a brown bottle containing God knew what sort of medicine. There was a television, although Susannah couldn’t imagine what old Joe might possibly watch on it (Eddie and Jake would have recognized the VCR sitting on the shelf beneath). But what took all of Susannah’s attention — and Roland’s, as well — was the photograph on one of the walls. It had been thumbtacked there slightly askew, in a casual fashion that seemed (to Susannah, at least) almost sacrilegious.

It was a photograph of the Dark Tower.

Her breath deserted her. She worked her way over to it, barely feeling the knots and nubbles of the rag rug beneath her palms, then raised her arms. “Roland, pick me up!”

He did, and she saw that his face had gone dead pale except for two hard balls of color burning in his thin cheeks. His eyes were blazing. The Tower stood against the darkening sky with sunset painting the hills behind it orange, the slitted windows rising in their eternal spiral. From some of those windows there spilled a dim and eldritch glow. She could see balconies jutting out from the dark stone sides at every two or three stories, and the squat doors that opened onto them, all shut. Locked as well, she had no doubt. Before the Tower was the field of roses, Can’-Ka No Rey, dim but still lovely in the shadows. Most of the roses were closed against the coming dark but a few still peeped out like sleepy eyes.

“Joe!” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper. She felt faint, and it seemed she could hear singing voices, far and wee. “Oh, Joe! This picture… !”

“Aye, mum,” he said, clearly pleased by her reaction. “It’s a good ’un, ain’t it? Which is why I pinned it up. I’ve got others, but this is the best. Right at sunset, so the shadow seems to lie forever back along the Path of the Beam. Which in a way it does, as I’m sure ye both must know.”

Roland’s breathing in her right ear was rapid and ragged, as if he’d just run a race, but Susannah barely noticed. For it was not just the subject of the picture that had filled her with awe.

“This is a Polaroid! ”

“Well…yar,” he said, sounding puzzled at the level of her excitement. “I suppose Stuttering Bill could have brung me a Kodak if I’d ast for one, but how would I ever have gotten the fillum developed? And by the time I thought of a video camera — for the gadget under the TV’d play such things — I was too old to go back, and yonder nag ’uz too old to carry me. Yet I would if I could, for it’s lovely there, a place of warm-hearted ghosts. I heard the singing voices of friends long gone; my Ma and Pa, too. I allus—”

A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made Susannah dizzy. “You’ve been there?” he asked. “ You’ve been to the Dark Tower? ”

“Indeed I have,” said the old man. “For who else do ye think took that pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?”

“ When did you take it?”

“That’s from my last trip,” he said. “Two year ago, in the summer — although that’s lower land, ye must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I’ve never seen it.”

“How long from here?”

Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn’t take him long, but to Roland and Susannah it seemed long, very long indeed. Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest at the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist and dance.

“Well,” he said, “ye’re on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill keeps Tower Road plowed for as far as ye’d go; what else does the old whatchamacallit have to do with his time? O’ course ye’ll want to wait here until this new nor’east jeezer blows itself out—”

“How long once we’re on the move?” Roland asked.

“Rarin t’go, ain’tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for if you’ve come from In-World ye must have been many long years gettin this far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I’m gonna say it’d take you six days to get out of the White Lands, maybe seven—”

“Do you call these lands Empathica?” Susannah asked.

He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. “Why no, ma’am — I’ve never heard this part of creation called anything but the White Lands.”

The puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as Father Christmas in a children’s play, had just lied to her. She wasn’t sure why, and before she could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: “Would you let that go for now? Would you, for your father’s sake?”

“Yes, Roland,” she said meekly. “Of course.”

Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his hip.

“Might take you as long as nine days, I guess,” Joe said, scratching his chin, “for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down the snow, but you can’t get him to stop. He’s got his orders to follow. His programmin, he calls it.” The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and raised his hand. “Nay, nay, I’m not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer — it’s just that I’m not much used to cump’ny.