The Dark Tower (91 page)

“Nah, nah,” Roland said, reaching out to grasp his arm. “I’ll do that, thee’ll fall on thy thiddles.”

At this the old man roared with laughter, and Roland joined him willingly enough. From behind the cottage, the horse gave another loud whinny, as if protesting all this good humor.

“‘Fall on thy thiddles’! Man, that’s a good one! I don’t have the veriest clue under heaven what my thiddles are, yet it’s a good one! Ain’t it just!” He brushed the snow off Susannah’s hide coat while Roland quickly picked up the spilled goods and stacked them back on their makeshift sled. Oy helped, bringing several wrapped packages of meat in his jaws and dropping them on the back of the travois.

“That’s a smart little beastie!” Joe Collins said admiringly.

“He’s been a good trailmate,” Susannah agreed. She was now very glad they had stopped; would not
have deprived herself of this good-natured old man’s acquaintance for worlds. She offered him her clumsily clad right hand. “I’m Susannah Dean—Susannah of New York. Daughter of Dan.”

He took her hand and shook it. His own hand was ungloved, and although the fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his grip was strong. “New York, is it! Why, I once hailed from there, myself. Also Akron, Omaha, and San Francisco. Son of Henry and Flora, if it matters to you.”

“You’re from America-side?” Susannah asked.

“Oh God yes, but long ago and long,” he said. “What’chee might call delah.” His good eye sparkled; his bad eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest. He turned to Roland. “And who might you be, my friend? For I’ll call you my friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I’d belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick.”

Roland was grinning. Was helpless not to, Susannah thought. “Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of Steven.”

“Gilead!
Gilead!
” Collins’s good eye went round with amazement. “There’s a name out of the past, ain’t it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you must be older’n God!”

“Some would say so,” Roland agreed, now only smiling . . . but warmly.

“And the little fella?” he asked, bending forward. From his pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of
déjà vu
. It brushed her mind like a wing and then was gone. “What’s your name, little fella? What do they holler when they want you to come home?”

“He doesn’t—”

—
talk anymore, although he did once
was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bumbler said: “Oy!” And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with Jake.

“Good fella!” Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into Oy’s mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd’s Lane and Tower Road.

“I’ll be damned,” Roland said mildly.

“So won’t we all in the end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam,” Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy’s paw. “But not today. Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it’s warm and we can palaver over a cup of coffee—for I have some, so I do—or a pot of ale. I even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine, especially with a teensy piss o’ rum in it, but who knows? I ain’t really
tasted
nuffink in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia’s done for my taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro’, what do you say?” He regarded them brightly.

“I’d say that sounds pretty damned fine,” Susannah told him. Rarely had she said anything she meant more.

He slapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don’t know if that’s Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t—

“Arrr, Lippy, goddam what used to be yer eyes, where do you think
you’re
going? Did yer want to meet these folks, was that it?”

His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that seems the exclusive property of people who
live alone except for a pet or two. His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the ugliest quadruped she’d seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind—not in one eye but in both—and scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recall: the slithering sound of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones.

Collins might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded almost defensive. “Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as she is, I don’t reckon you’ll be winnin many beauty contests yourself!” He patted the horse’s chafed and sore-looking neck, then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.

“Come on, Lippy, y’old ki’-box and gammergurt, ye swayback nag and lost four-legged leper! Can’t ye smell the snow in the air? Because I can, and my nose went south years ago!”

He turned back to Roland and Susannah and said, “I hope y’prove partial to my cookin, so I do, because I think this is gonna be a three-day blow. Aye, three at least before Demon Moon shows er face again! But we’re well-met, so we are, and I set
my watch and warrant on it! Ye just don’t want to judge my hospitality by my
horse
-pitality! Hee!”

I should hope not,
Susannah thought, and gave a little shiver. The old man had turned away, but Roland gave her a curious look. She smiled and shook her head as if to say
It’s nothing
—which, of course, it was. She wasn’t about to tell the gunslinger that a spavined nag with cataracts on her eyes and her ribs showing had given her a case of the whim-whams. Roland had never called her a silly goose, and by God she didn’t mean to give him cause to do so n—

As if hearing her thoughts, the old nag looked back and bared her few remaining teeth at Susannah. The eyes in Lippy’s bony wedge of a head were pus-rimmed plugs of blindness above her somehow gruesome grin. She whinnied at Susannah as if to say
Think what you will, blackbird; I’ll be here long after thee’s gone thy course and died thy death
. At the same time the wind gusted, swirling snow in their faces, soughing in the snow-laden firs, and hooting beneath the eaves of Collins’s little house. It began to die away and then strengthened again for a moment, making a brief, grieving cry that sounded almost human.

The outbuilding consisted of a chicken-coop on one side, Lippy’s stall on the other, and a little loft stuffed with hay. “I can get up there and fork it down,” Collins said, “but I take my life in my hands ever time I do, thanks to this bust hip of mine. Now, I can’t make you help an old man, sai Deschain, but if you would . . . ?”

Roland climbed the ladder resting a-tilt against the edge of the loft floor and tossed down hay until Collins told him it was good, plenty enough to last Lippy through even four days’ worth of blow. (“For she don’t eat worth what’chee might call a Polish fuck, as you can see lookin at her,” he said.) Then the gunslinger came back down and Collins led them along the short back walk to his cottage. The snow piled on either side was as high as Roland’s head.

“Be it ever so humble, et cet’ra,” Joe said, and ushered them into his kitchen. It was paneled in knotty pine which was actually plastic, Susannah saw when she got closer. And it was delightfully warm. The name on the electric stove was Rossco, a brand she’d never heard of. The fridge was an Amana and had a special little door set into the front, above the handle. She leaned closer and saw the words
MAGIC ICE
. “This thing makes ice cubes?” she asked, delighted.

“Well, no, not exactly,” Joe said. “It’s the
freezer
that makes em, beauty; that thing on the front just drops em into your drink.”

This struck her funny, and she laughed. She looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with his old fiendish grin, and that made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell of the kitchen was wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice.

Roland was looking up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. “Yar, yar, I got all the ’lectric,” he said. “Hot-air furnace, too, ain’t it nice? And nobody ever sends me a bill! The genny’s in a shed round to t’other side. It’s a Honda, and quiet as Sunday morning! Even when you get right up on
top of its little shed, you don’t hear nuffink but
mmmmmm
. Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it needs maintaining, which hasn’t been but twice in all the time I’ve been here. Nawp, Joey’s lyin, he’ll soon be dyin. Three times, it’s been. Three in all.”

“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—”