The Dark Tower

He’d killed the man (by accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and knew the difference between by accident and on 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, was facilitator. And he later became sure that certain folks—certain talent scouts—were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but not how 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 actually catching: 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 were already 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 certain kind 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 promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if you were THE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELY 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 Sacramento Bee.

“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