Stephen King - The Dark Tower

“Once you get down b’low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain’t no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There’s another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a’ wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat’tries are all dead, natcherly — flat as yer hat — but there’s a gennie there, too, Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that’d cut your time down to four days at most. So here’s what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one o’ them hummers — that’s what I call em, hummers, for that’s the sound they make when they’re runnin — I should say ten days. Maybe eleven.”

The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, no doubt.

“Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk,” Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. “After all the years and all the miles.”

Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. But there was something off-key here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that .

Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?

And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?

“Tell me something, Joe Collins,” Roland said.

“Aye, gunslinger, if I can.”

“Have you been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?”

The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him. When he was sure that wasn’t the case, he looked shocked. “No,” he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannah herself. “That pitcher’s as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I’m gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away. What the robot’d call five hundred arcs o’ the wheel.”

Roland nodded. “And why not?”

“Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today.”

After dinner — surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life — the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.

He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas (“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by the stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.

“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,” Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her plate for the second time, sop-ping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m not sure I can even get down from this chair.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, looking disappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch one.”

Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I think.”

“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,” Susannah allowed. How many eons since she’d tasted butterscotch?

When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run “the whole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.

He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred’s out there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child.

“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,” Roland invited.

Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,” he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.” The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”

He’d started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked the kids — loved them, in fact — but hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.

“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted to know.

“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em the old stand-up.”

“Stand-up?”

“He means he was a comedian,” Susannah said. “He told jokes.”

“Correct!” Joe said brightly. “Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority.”

He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men’s clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gig led to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on the weekends, even the third-rate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.

This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe called “current events material”: hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, movie-stars, and, as always, politics — but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he’d stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met .

During his recitation, an odd (and — to Susannah, at least — rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins’s Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to cross-fade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American. She kept expecting to hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard as hoid, but she guessed that was only because she’d spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as they rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid ; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd ; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle .