The Dark Tower

“I closed my eyes and went through. There was a brief sensation of being turned on my head, but that was all. No chimes, no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared to the Santa Mira doorway. I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy highway. There was a piece of newspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked it up and saw I’d landed in April of 1960, almost five years after Armitage and his friends herded us through the door in Santa Mira, on the other side of the country. I was looking at a piece of the Hartford Courant, you see. And the road turned out to be the Merritt Parkway.”

“Sheemie can make magic doors!” Roland cried. He had been cleaning his revolver as he listened, but now he put it aside. “That’s what teleporting is! That’s what it means!”

“Hush, Roland,” Susannah said. “This must be his Connecticut adventure. I want to hear this part.”

ELEVEN

But none of them hear about Ted’s Connecticut adventure. He simply calls it “a story for another day” and tells his listeners that he was caught in Bridgeport while trying to accumulate enough cash to disappear permanently. The low men bundled him into a car, drove him to New York, and took him to a ribjoint called the Dixie Pig. From there to Fedic, and from Fedic to Thunderclap Station; from the station right back to the Devar-Toi, oh Ted, so good to see you, welcome back.

The fourth tape is now three-quarters done, and Ted’s voice is little more than a croak. Nevertheless, he gamely pushes on.

“I hadn’t been gone long, but over here time had taken one of its erratic slips forward. Humma o’ Tego was out, possibly because of me, and Prentiss of New Jersey, the ki’-dam, was in. He and Finli interrogated me in the Master’s suite a good many times. There was no physical torture—I guess they still reckoned me too important to chance spoiling me—but there was a lot of discomfort and plenty of mind-games. They also made it clear that if I tried to run again, my Connecticut friends would be put to death. I said, ‘Don’t you boys get it? If I keep doing my job, they’re going out, anyway. Everybody’s going out, with the possible exception of the one you call the Crimson King.’

“Prentiss steepled his fingers in the annoying way he has and said, ‘That may be or may not be true, sai, but if it is, we won’t suffer when we “go out,” as you put it. Little Bobby and little Carol, on the other hand . . . not to mention Carol’s mother and Bobby’s friend, Sully-John . . . ’ He didn’t have to finish. I still wonder if they knew how terribly frightened they’d made me with that threat against my young friends. And how terribly angry.