The Dark Tower

“Sometimes there are voices,” he says. “Why don’t you just say it?”

And then, laughing: “I guess I just did.”

He hears the approaching click of toenails down the hall, and Marlowe pokes his long nose into the office. He’s a Welsh Corgi, with short legs and big ears, and a pretty old guy now, with his own aches and pains, not to mention the eye he lost to cancer the previous year. The vet said he probably wouldn’t make it back from that one, but he did. What a good guy. What a tough guy. And when he raises his head from his necessarily low perspective to look at the writer, he’s wearing his old fiendish grin. How’s it goin, bubba? that look seems to say. Gettin any good words today? How do ya?

“I do fine,” he tells Marlowe. “Hangin in. How are you doin?”

Marlowe (sometimes known as The Snoutmaster) waggles his arthritic rear end in response.

“You again.” That’s what I said to him. And he asked, “Do you remember me?” Or maybe he said it—“You remember me.” I told him I was thirsty. He said he didn’t have anything to drink, he said sorry, and I called him a liar. And I was right to call him a liar because he wasn’t sorry a bit. He didn’t care a row of pins if I was thirsty because Jake was dead and he tried to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me—

“But none of that actually happened,” King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward the kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his increasingly long naps. The house is empty except for the two of them, and under those circumstances he often talks to himself. “I mean, you know that, don’t you? That none of it actually happened?”

He supposes he does, but it was so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise there, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is ever completely under the writer’s control, but this one is so out of control it’s ridiculous. It really is more like watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made-up story.

He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and forget the whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see the new Clint Eastwood movie, Bloodwork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow he’ll be back at his desk, and something from the film may slip out into the book—certainly Roland himself was partly Clint Eastwood to start with, Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name.

And . . . speaking of books . . .

Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor just this morning: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It contains, of course, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the narrative poem that lies at the root of King’s long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his face that stops just short of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King has always suspected dogs are fairly recent émigrés from that great I-know-just-how-you-feel country of Empathica), Marlowe’s own fiendish grin appears to widen.

“One place for the poem, old boy,” King says, and tosses the book back onto the coffee-table. It’s a big ’un, and lands with a thud. “One place and one place only.” Then he settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes. Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he’s fooling himself, knowing he’ll almost certainly doze off. As he does.

PART FOUR: THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA DANDELO

CHAPTER I: THE THING UNDER THE CASTLE

ONE

They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King’s Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean’s fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre’s desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them. These they destroyed, using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.