The Dark Tower

screams her lungs out, and Jake would scream too if he could but his chest is locked down with terror, o here is Discordia incarnate! In the monster’s eyes he sees the utter nothing that means the end of everything, for pleading won’t work with such a monster and screaming won’t work with such a monster, it’s too dumb, all screaming does is attract the monster’s attention, and does, it turns toward the Daisy Mae with the bodacious ta-tas and then it charges the Daisy Mae with the bodacious ta-tas, and in the kitchen (the mighty kitchen) he hears the Tokens, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, they are singing about the jungle, the peaceful jungle, and here in front of the little boy’s huge horrified eyes is a jungle which is anything but peaceful, and it’s not a lion but a lumbering thing that looks sort of like a rhinoceros only bigger, and it has a kind of bone collar around its neck, and later Jake will find out you call this kind of monster a triceratops, but for now it is nameless, which makes it even worse, nameless is worse. “Wimeweh,” sing the Tokens, “Weee-ummm-a-weh,” and of course Cesar Romero shoots the monster just before it can tear the girl with the bodacious ta-tas limb from limb, which is good at the time, but that night the monster comes back, the triceratops comes back, it’s in his closet, because even at four he understands that sometimes his closet isn’t his closet, that its door can open on different places where there are worse things waiting.

He begins to scream, at night he can scream, and Mrs. Greta Shaw comes into the room. She sits on the edge of his bed, her face ghostly with blue-gray beautymud, and she asks him what’s wrong ’Bama and he is actually able to tell her. He could never have told his father or mother, had one of them been there to begin with, which they of course aren’t, but he can tell Mrs. Shaw because while she isn’t a lot different from the other help—the au pairs babysitters child minders schoolwalkers—she is a little different, enough to put his drawings on the fridge with the little magnets, enough to make all the difference, to hold up the tower of a silly little boy’s sanity, say hallelujah, say found not lost, say amen.

She listens to everything he has to say, nodding, and makes him say tri-CER-a-TOPS until finally he gets it right. Getting it right is better. And then she says, “Those things were real once, but they died out a hundred million years ago, ’Bama. Maybe even more. Now don’t bother me any more because I need my sleep.”