2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

Five

The end of the second tape pulled free of the hub and made a softfwip-fwip-fwip sound as it turned.

“Jesus,” Susannah said. “Jesus, that poor man.”

“So long ago,” Jake said, and shook his head as if to clear it. To him, the years between his when and Mr. Brautigan’s seemed an unbridgeable chasm.

Eddie picked up the third box and displayed the tape inside, raising his eyebrows at Roland. The gunslinger twirled a finger in his old gesture, the one that said go on, go on.

Eddie threaded the tape through the heads. He’d never done this before, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went. The tired voice began again, speaking from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created from nothing more than imagination. A balcony on the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan had called it.

He’d killed the man (by accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and knew the difference betweenby accident andon purpose without needing to discuss the matter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan was on a westbound train. Three days later he was scanning the Accountants Wanted ads in the Des Moines newspaper. He knew something about himself by then, knew how careful he would have to be. He could no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when anger was justified. Ordinarily he was just your garden-variety telepath—could tell you what you had for lunch,

could tell you which card was the queen of hearts because the streetcorner sharpie running the monte-con knew—but when angry he had access to this spear, this terrible spear…

“And just by the way, that’s not true,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “The part

about being just a garden-variety telepath, I mean, and I understood that even when I was a wet-behind-the-ears kid trying to get into the Army. I just didn’t know the word for what I was.”

The word, it turned out, wasfacilitator. And he later became sure that certain folks—certaintalent scouts —were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but nothow different. For one thing, telepaths who did not come from the Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted had come to realize by the mid-nineteen-thirties that what he had was actuallycatching : if

he touched a person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a telepath. What he hadn’t known then was that people who werealready telepaths became

stronger.

Exponentially stronger.

“But that’s ahead of my story,” he said.

He moved from town to town, a hobo who rode the rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And in retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being

watched. It was an intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. He became aware of a certainkind of people, for instance. A few were women,

most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in

colors as garish as their clothing. Their faces were oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive.

It was a look he much later came to associate with dumbbells who’d gotten plastic surgery

from quack doctors. During that same twenty-year period—but once again not consciously, only in the corner of his mind’s eye—he became aware that no matter what city he was in,

those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and stoops and sidewalks. Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons. Sometimes a red eye. There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but not always. Later on, he said, it all

fit together in a crazy sort of way, but not back in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting. No, back then he’d been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not wanting to see what was right in front of him, because it was…disturbing.

And then, right around the time Korea was winding down, he saw The Ad. It promisedTHE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if you wereTHE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS , there would beABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED . A number of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it in the SacramentoBee .

“Holy crap!” Jake cried. “That’s the same paper Pere Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder—”

“Hush,” Roland said. “Listen.”

They listened.

Six

The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few weeks—not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algul). The interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a

great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly themasksthey wear, are not good, not when you’re up close and personal. Up close and

personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their becomingwith a religious fervor. The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug with a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are becomingis older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads—the Eye of the King—usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the

nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’s snot-gutters?

Whatever they think, up close and personal there’s something definitely wrong with them even when they’re America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s properly in place. So it’s humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they find it demeaning, like “nigger” or “vamp”) at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing

but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.

Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the

one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks

(wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing—a

ninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabulary questions—half of them are empty. After the second round, it’s three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty

weird questions, highlysubjectivequestions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in which he does not believe, because he thinks—maybe knows—that the people giving the

test want a different answer from the one he (and most people) would ordinarily give. For instance, there’s this little honey:

23. You come to a stop near an over-turned car on a little-traveled road. Trapped in the car is a Young Man crying for rescue. You ask, “Are you hurt, Young Man?” to which he responds, “I don’t think so!” In the field nearby is a Satchel filled with Money. You:

1.Rescue the Young Man and give him back his Money

2.Rescue the Young Man but insist that the Money be taken to the local Police

3.Take the Money and go on your way, knowing that although the road may be little traveled, someone will be along eventually to free the Young Man

4.None of the above

Had this been a test for the Sacramento PD, Ted would have circled “b” in a heartbeat. He may be little more than a hobo on the road, but his mama didn’t raise no fools, thank you oh

so very much. That choice would be the correct one in most circumstances, too—the play-it-safe choice, the can’t-go-wrong choice. And, as a fall-back position, the one that says “I don’t have a frigging clue what this is about but at least I’m honest enough to say so,” there’s “d.”

Ted circles “c,” but not because that is necessarily what he’d do in that situation. On the whole he tends to think that he’d go for “a,” presuming he could at least ask the “Young Man” a few questions about where the loot came from. And if outright torture wasn’t involved (and he would know, wouldn’t he, no matter what the “Young Man” might have to say on the subject), sure, here’s your money,Vaya con Dios.And why? Because Ted

Brautigan happens to believe that the owner of the defunct candystore had a point: THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN.

But he circles “c,” and five days later he finds himself in the ante-room of an

out-of-business dance studio in San Francisco (his train-fare from Sacramento prepaid), along with three other men and a sullen-looking teenage girl (the girl’s the former Tanya

Leeds of Bryce, Colorado, as it turns out). Better than four hundred people showed up for the test in the gym, lured by the honeypot ad. Goats, for the most part. Here, however, are four sheep. One per cent. And even this, as Brautigan will discover in the full course of time, is an amazing catch.

Eventually he is shown into an office markedPRIVATE . It is mostly filled with dusty ballet stuff. A broad-shouldered, hard-faced man in a brown suit sits in a folding chair, incongruously surrounded by filmy pink tutus. Ted thinks,A real toad in an imaginary garden.

The man sits forward, arms on his elephantine thighs. “Mr. Brautigan,” he says, “I may or may not be a toad, but I can offer you the job of a lifetime. I can also send you out of here

with a handshake and a much-obliged. It depends on the answer to one question. A question about a question, in fact.”

The man, whose name turns out to be Frank Armitage, hands Ted a sheet of paper. On it, blown up, is Question 23, the one about the Young Man and the Satchel of Money.

“You circled‘c,’ ”Frank Armitage says. “So now, with absolutely no hesitation whatever,please tell me why.”

“Because‘c’was what you wanted,” Ted replies with absolutely no hesitation whatever.

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I’m a telepath,” Ted says. “And that’s what you’rereallylooking for.” He tries to keep his poker face and thinks he succeeds pretty well, but inside he’s filled with a great and singing relief. Because he’s found a job? No. Because they’ll shortly make him an

offer that would make the prizes on the new TV quiz shows look tame? No.

Because someone finally wants what he can do.

Because someone finally wantshim.

Seven

The job offer turned out to be another honeypot, but Brautigan was honest enough in his taped memoir to say he might have gone along even if he’d known the truth.

“Because talent won’t be quiet, doesn’t knowhow to be quiet,” he said. “Whether it’s a

talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It’ll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, ‘Use me, use me, use me! I’m tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!’ ”

Jake broke into a roar of pre-adolescent laughter. He covered his mouth but kept laughing through his hands. Oy looked up at him, those black eyes with the gold wedding rings floating in them, grinning fiendishly.

There in the room filled with the frilly pink tutus, his fedora hat cocked back on his crewcut head, Armitage asked if Ted had ever heard of “the South American Seabees.” When Ted replied that he hadn’t, Armitage told him that a consortium of wealthy South

American businessmen, mostly Brazilian, had hired a bunch of American engineers, construction workers, and roughnecks in 1946. Over a hundred in all. These were the South American Seabees. The consortium hired them all for a four-year period, and at different

pay-grades, but the pay was extremely generous—almost embarrassingly so—at all grades.

A ’dozer operator might sign a contract for $20,000 a year, for instance, which was tall tickets in those days. But there was more: a bonus equal to one year’s pay. A total of

$100,000. If, that was, the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work, and you don’t come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two days

off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year, just like in America, but in the pampas. You couldn’t go back to North America (or even Rio) until your

four-year hitch was over. If you died in South America, you got planted there—no one was going to pay to have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up front, and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest it, or ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone-deep tan, a whole new set of muscles, and a

lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course, once you were out you had what the limeys liked to call “the other half” to put on top of it.

This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front half would be a cool quarter of a million and the back end half a million.

“Which sounded incredible,” Ted said from the Wollensak. “Of course it did, by jiminy. I didn’t find out until later how incredibly cheap they were buying us, even at those prices. Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of their stinginess…‘they’ in this case being all the King’s bureaucrats. He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all creation on the budget plan, and of course he’s right, but I think even Dinky realizes—although he won’t admit it, of course—that if you offer a man too much, he

simply refuses to believe it. Or, depending on his imagination (many telepaths and precogs have almost no imagination at all), beunable to believe it. In our case the period of indenture was to be six years, with an option to renew, and Armitage needed my decision

immediately. Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle your target’s mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.

“I was duly blitzed, and agreed at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in the Seaman’s San Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I

got down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his hands—big as a ham, it was—and told methat was our contract. I asked him where I’d be going and what I’d be doing—all questions I should have asked first, I’m sure you’d agree,

but I was so stunned it never crossed my mind.

“Besides, I was pretty sure I knew. I thought I’d be working for the government. Some kind of Cold War deal. The telepathic branch of the CIA or FBI, set up on an island in the Pacific. I remember thinking it would make one hell of a radio play.

“Armitage told me, ‘You’ll be traveling far, Ted, but it will also be right next door. And for the time being, that’s all I can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our arrangement during the eight weeks before you actually…mmm…ship out. Remember that

loose lips sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are being watched.’

“And of course Iwas watched. Later—toolater, in a manner of speaking—I was able to replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that the can-toi were watching me the whole time.

“The low men.”

Eight

“Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “I remember the date with perfect clarity; it was Halloween of 1955. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave Ittaway, Dick…I can’t remember

his last name, he died about six months later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of the ki’cans backed him up—ki’can sort of means shit-people or shit-folken,if you’re interested—but it was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest…well, remember Doc Number Two? The rest were and are like him. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to know, sai, don’t mess up my worldview.’ Anyway, the last one was Tanya Leeds. Tough little thing…”

A pause and a click. Then Ted’s voice resumed, sounding temporarily refreshed. The third tape had almost finished.He must have really burned through the rest of the story, Eddie thought, and found that the idea disappointed him. Whatever else he was, Ted was a hell of a good tale-spinner.

“Armitage and his colleagues showed up in a Ford station wagon, what we called a woody in those charming days. They drove us inland, to a town called Santa Mira. There was a

paved main street. The rest of them were dirt. I remember there were a lot of oil-derricks, looking like praying mantises, sort of…although it was dark by then and they were really

just shapes against the sky.

“I was expecting a train depot, or maybe a bus withCHARTERED in the destination window. Instead we pulled up to this empty freight depot with a sign readingSANTA

MIRA SHIPPING hanging askew on the front and I got a thought, clear as day, from Dick whatever-his-name was.They’re going to kill us, he was thinking.They brought us out here

to kill us and steal our stuff .

“If you’re not a telepath, you don’t know how scary something like that can be. How the surety of it kind of…invades your head. I saw Dave Ittaway go pale, and although Tanya didn’t make a sound—she was a tough little thing, as I told you—it was bright enough in

the car to see there were tears standing in the corners of her eyes.

“I leaned over her, took Dick’s hands in mine, and squeezed down on them when he tried to pull away. I thought at him,They didn’t give us a quarter of a mill each, most of it still stashed safe in the Seaman’s Bank, so they could bring us out to the williwags and steal our watches. And Jace thought at me,I don’t even havea watch. I pawned my Gruen two years

ago in Albuquerque, and by the time I thought about buying another one—around midnight last night, this was—all the stores were closed and I was too drunk to climb down off the barstool I was on, anyway.

“That relaxed us, and we all had a laugh. Armitage asked us what we were laughing about and that relaxed us even more, because we had something they didn’t, could communicate in a way they couldn’t. I told him it was nothing, then gave Dick’s hands another little squeeze. It did the job. I…facilitated him, I suppose. It was my first time doing that. The first of many. That’s part of the reason I’m so tired; all that facilitating wears a man out.

“Armitage and the others led us inside. The place was deserted, but at the far end there was a door with two words chalked on it, along with those moons and stars.THUNDERCLAP

STATION , it said. Well, therewas no station: no tracks, no buses, no road other than the one we’d used to get there. There were windows on either side of the door and nothing on

the other side of the building but a couple of smaller buildings—deserted sheds, one of them just a burnt-out shell—and a lot of scrub-land littered with trash.

“Dave Ittaway said, ‘Why are we going out there?’ and one of the others said, ‘You’ll see,’ and we certainly did.

“ ‘Ladies first,’ Armitage said, and he opened the door.

“It was dark on the other side, but not the samekind of dark. It wasdarker dark. If you’ve seen Thunderclap at night, you’ll know. And it sounded different. Old buddy Dick there had some second thoughts and turned around. One of the men pulled a gun. And I’ll never forget what Armitage said. Because he sounded…kindly. ‘Too late to back out now,’ he said. ‘Now you can only go forward.’

“And I think right then I knew that business about the six-year plan, and re-upping if we wanted to, was what my friend Bobby Garfield andhis friend Sully-John would have called just a shuck and jive. Not that we could read it in their thoughts. They were all wearing hats,

you see. You never see a low man—or a low lady, for that matter—without a hat on. The men’s looked like plain old fedoras, the sort most guys wore back then, but these were no

ordinary lids. They were thinking-caps. Althoughanti -thinking-caps would be more

accurate; they muffle the thoughts of the people wearing them. If you try to prog someone who’s wearing one—progis Dinky’s word for thought-reading—you just get a hum with a

lot of whispering underneath. Very unpleasant, like the todash chimes. If you’ve heard them, you know. Discourages too much effort, and effort’s the last thing most of the

telepaths in the Algul are interested in. What the Breakers are mostly interested in, lady and gentlemen, is going along to get along. Which only shows up for what it is—monstrous—if you pull back and take the long view. One more thing most Breakers are not into. Quite

often you hear a saying—a little poem—around campus, or see it chalked on the walls:

‘Enjoy the cruise, turn on the fan, there’s nothing to lose, so work on your tan.’ It means a lot more than ‘Take it easy.’ The implications of that little piece of doggerel are extremely unpleasant. I wonder if you can see that.”

Eddie thoughthe could, at least, and it occurred to him that his brother Henry would have made an absolutely wonderful Breaker. Always assuming he’d been allowed to take along

his heroin and his Creedence Clearwater Revival albums, that was.

A longer pause from Ted, then a rueful sort of laugh.

“I believe it’s time to make a long story a little shorter. We went through the door, leave it at that. If you’ve done it, you know it can be very unpleasant, if the door’s not in tip-top

working order. And the door between Santa Mira, California, and Thunderclap was in better shape than some I’ve been through since.

“For a moment there was only darkness on the other side, and the howl of what the taheen call desert-dogs. Then a cluster of lights went on and we saw these…thesethings with the

heads of birds and weasels and one with the head of a bull, horns and all. Jace screamed,

and so did I. Dave Ittaway turned and tried to run, but Armitage grabbed him. Even if he hadn’t, where was there to go? Back through the door? It was closed, and for all I know, that’s a one-way. The only one of us who never made a sound was Tanya, and when she

looked at me, what I saw in her eyes and read in her thoughts was relief. Because we knew, you see. Not all the questions were answered, but the two that mattered were. Where were

we? In another world. When were we coming back? Never in life. Our money would sit in the Seaman’s of San Francisco until it turned into millions, and no one would ever spend it.

We were in for the long haul.

“There was a bus there, with a robot driver named Phil. ‘My name’s Phil, I’m over the hill, but the best news is that I never spill,’ he said. He smelled like lightning and there were all sorts of discordant clicking sounds coming from deep in his guts. Old Phil’s dead now,

dumped in the train and robot graveyard with God alone knows how many others, but they’ve got enough mechanized help to finish what they’ve started, I’m sure.

“Dick fainted when we came out on Thunderclap-side, but by the time we could see the lights of the compound, he’d come around again. Tanya had his head in her lap, and I remember how gratefully he was looking up at her. It’s funny what you remember, isn’t it?

They checked us in at the gate. Assigned us our dorms, assigned us our suites, saw that we were fed…and a damned fine meal it was. The first of many.

“The next day, we went to work. And, barring my little ‘vacation in Connecticut,’ we’ve

been working ever since.”

Another pause. Then:

“God help us, we’ve been working ever since. And, God forgive us, most of us have been happy. Because the only thing talent wants is to be used.”

Nine

He tells them of his first few shifts in The Study, and his realization—not gradual but

almost immediate—that they are not here to search out spies or read the thoughts of

Russian scientists, “or any of that space-shot nonsense,” as Dinky would say (not that

Dinky was there at first, although Sheemie was). No, what they are doing isbreakingsomething. He can feel it, not just in the sky above Algul Siento but everywhere around them, even under their feet.

Yet he is content enough. The food is good, and although his sexual appetites have subsided quite a bit over the years, he’s not a bit averse to the odd bonk, just reminding

himself every time that sim sex is really nothing but accessorized masturbation. But then, he’s had the odd bonk with the odd whore over the years, as many men living on the road

have, and he could testify that that sort of sex is also not much different than masturbation; you’re putting it to her just as hard as you can, the sweat pouring off you, and she’s going “Baby-baby-baby,” and all the time wondering if she ought to gas the car and trying to

remember which day is double stamps at the Red & White. As with most things in life, you have to use your imagination, and Ted can do that, he’s good at the old visualization thing,

thank you oh so very much. He likes the roof over his head, he likes the company—the guards are guards, yeah, but he believes them when they say it’s as much their job to keep bad stuff from getting in as it is to make sure the Breakers don’t get out. He likes most of

the inmates, too, and realizes after a year or two that the inmates need him in some strange way. He’s able to comfort them when they get the mean reds; he’s able to assuage their

crampy waves of homesickness with an hour or so of murmured conversation. And surely this is a good thing. Maybe it’salla good thing—certainly it feelslike a good thing. To be

homesick is human, but to Break is divine. He tries to explain to Roland and his tet, but the best he can do, the closest he can come, is to say it’s like finally being able to scratch that

out-of-reach place on your back that always drives you crazy with its mild but persistent

itch. He likesto go to The Study, and so do all the others. He likes the feeling of sitting there, of smelling the good wood and good leather, of searching…searching…and then, suddenly, aahhh.There you are. You’re hooked in, swinging like a monkey on a limb. You’re

breaking,baby, and to break is divine.

Dinky once said that The Study was the only place in the world where he really felt in

touch with himself, and that was why he wanted to see it shut down.Burneddown, if possible. “Because I know the kind of shit I get up to when I’m in touch with myself,” he told Ted. “When I, you know, really get in the groove.” And Ted knew exactly what he was

talking about. Because The Study was alwaystoo good to be true. You sat down, maybe picked up a magazine, looked at pictures of models and margarine, movie stars and motor

cars, and you felt your mind rise.The Beam was all around, it was like being in some vast corridor full of force, but your mind always rose to the roof and when it got there it found that big old sliding groove.

Maybe once, just after thePrimwithdrew and Gan’s voice still echoed in the rooms of the macroverse, the Beams were smooth and polished, but those days are gone. Now the Way of the Bear and the Turtle is lumpy and eroded, full of coves and cols and bays and cracks, plenty of places to get your fingers in and take hold, and sometimes you dragat it and sometimes you can feel yourself worming your way intoit like a drop of acid that can think. Allthese sensations are intensely pleasurable. Sexy.

And for Ted there’s something else, as well, although he doesn’t know he’s the only one who’s got it until Trampas tells him. Trampas nevermeansto tell him anything, but he’s got

this lousy case of eczema, you see, and it changes everything. Hard to believe a flaky scalp might be responsible for saving the Dark Tower, but the idea’s not entirely farfetched.

Not entirely farfetched at all.

Ten

“There are about a hundred and eighty full-time personnel at work in the Algul,” Ted said. “I’m not the guy to tell anyone how to do his job, but that’s something you may want to write down, or at least remember. Roughly speaking, it’s sixty per eight-hour shift and split

twenty-twenty-twenty. Taheen have the sharpest eyes and generally man the watchtowers. Humes patrol the outer run of fence. With guns, mind you—hard calibers. Top-side there’s Prentiss, the Master, and Finli o’ Tego, the Security Chief—hume and taheen, respectively—but most of the floaters are can-toi…the low men, you understand.

“Most low men don’t get along with the Breakers; a little stiff camaraderie is the best they can do. Dinky told me once that they’re jealous of us because we’re what he calls ‘finished humes.’ Like the hume guards, the can-toi wear thinking-caps when they’re on duty so we can’t prog them. The fact is most Breakers haven’t tried to prog anyone or anything but the Beam in years, and maybe can’t, anymore; the mind is also a muscle, and like any other, it atrophies if you don’t use it.”

A pause. A click on the tape. Then:

“I’m not going to be able to finish. I’m disappointed but not entirely surprised. This will have to be my last story, folks. I’m sorry.”

A low sound. A sipping sound, Susannah was quite sure; Ted having another drink of water.

“Have I told you that the taheen don’t need the thinking-caps? They speak perfectly good English, and I’ve sensed from time to time that some have limited progging abilities of

their own, can send and receive—at least a little—but if you dip into them, you get these