The Dark Tower

“Well, I might pass, anyway,” Eddie said. “I had a poorboy back in Maine, and it’s sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker.”

“You should say un, deux, trois,” Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew she was going to say them.

“Cry pardon?” Eddie was sitting with his arm around her. Since the four of them had gotten back together, he touched Susannah at every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than just wishful thinking.

“Nothing.” Later, when Nigel was either out of the room or completely broken down, she’d tell him her intuition. She thought that robots of Nigel and Andy’s type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she’d read as a teenager, weren’t supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been modified or had modified himself so that wasn’t a problem. With Nigel, she thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes — he’d either lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder. Maybe about other things, as well. Ein, zwei, drei and Un, deux, trois was his method of letting off the pressure. For awhile, anyway.

It’s Mordred, she thought, looking around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat — like Jake, she was ravenous — but her appetite was gone and she knew she’d take no enjoyment from what she plugged grimly down her throat. He’s been at Nigel, and now he’s watching us somewhere. I know it — I feel it.

And, as she took her first bite of some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat:

A mother always knows.

Three

None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room (although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters, pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off in either German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other language none of them knew.

Their way led them through a kitchen — all stainless steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia — and although they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this.

Susannah’s sense of being observed came and went.

Beyond the pantry was a neat little three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler’s pantry full of monitoring equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured by North Central Positronics, no surprise there. Nigel brought them blankets and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean.

“Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else,” Eddie said.

“Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy,” Nigel said. “I enjoy a good book. It’s part of my programming.”

“We’ll sleep six hours, then push on,” Roland told them.

Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. “He’s got all of Dickens, it looks like,” he said. “Also Steinbeck…Thomas Wolfe…a lot of Zane Grey…somebody named Max Brand…a guy named Elmore Leonard…and the always popular Steve King.”

They all took time to look at the two shelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writer-bee since his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts in Atlantis and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about them. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however, because he had written so much.

Susannah inquired of Nigel, who said he had never seen any books by Stephen King concerning Roland of Gilead or the Dark Tower. Then, having said so, he twisted his head viciously to the left and counted off in French, this time all the way to ten.

“Still,” Eddie said after Nigel had retired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room, “I bet there’s a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we could pack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?”

“Maybe,” Roland said, “but we won’t. They might confuse us.”

“Why do you say so?”

Roland only shook his head. He didn’t know why he said so, but he knew it was true.

Four