The Dark Tower

Look, if you would. Here sits a baby with blood streaking his fair skin. Here sits a baby weeping his silent, eerie tears. Here sits a baby that knows both too much and too little, and although we must keep our fingers away from his mouth (he snaps, this one; snaps like a baby crocodile), we are allowed to pity him a little. If ka is a train—and it is, a vast, hurtling mono, maybe sane, maybe not—then this nasty little lycanthrope is its most vulnerable hostage, not tied to the tracks like little Nell but strapped to the thing’s very headlight.

He may tell himself he has two fathers, and there may be some truth to it, but there is no father here and no mother, either. He ate his mother alive, say true, ate her big-big, she was his first meal, and what choice did he have about that? He is the last miracle ever to be spawned by the still-standing Dark Tower, the scarred wedding of the rational and the irrational, the natural and the supernatural, and yet he is alone, and he is a-hungry. Destiny might have intended him to rule a chain of universes (or destroy them all), but so far he has succeeded in establishing dominion over nothing but one old domestic robot who has now gone to the clearing at the end of the path.

He looks at the sleeping gunslinger with love and hate, loathing and longing. But suppose he went to them and was not killed? What if they were to welcome him in? Ridiculous idea, yes, but allow it for the sake of argument. Even then he would be expected to set Roland above him, accept Roland as dinh, and that he will never do, never do, no, never do.

CHAPTER III: THE SHINING WIRE

ONE

“You were watching them,” said a soft, laughing voice. Then it lilted a bit of cradle nonsense Roland would have remembered well from his own early childhood: “‘Penny, posy, Jack’s a-nosy! Do ya say so? Yes I do-so! He’s my sneaky, peeky, darling bah-bo!’ Did you like what you saw before you fell asleep? Did you watch them move on with the rest of the failing world?”

Perhaps ten hours had passed since Nigel the domestic robot had performed his last duty. Mordred, who in fact had fallen deeply asleep, turned his head toward the voice of the stranger with no residual fuzzy-headedness or surprise. He saw a man in bluejeans and a hooded parka standing on the gray tiles of the Control Center. His gunna—nothing more than a beat-up duffelbag—lay at his feet. His cheeks were flushed, his face handsome, his eyes burning hot. In his hand was an automatic pistol, and as he looked into the dark eye of its muzzle, Mordred Deschain for the second time realized that even gods could die once their divinity had been diluted with human blood. But he wasn’t afraid. Not of this one. He did look back into the monitors that showed Nigel’s apartment, and confirmed that the newcomer was right: it was empty.

The smiling stranger, who seemed to have sprung from the very floor, raised the hand not holding the gun to the hood of his parka and turned a bit of it outward. Mordred saw a flash of metal. Some kind of woven wire coated the inside of the hood.

“I call it my ‘thinking-cap,’” said the stranger. “I can’t hear your thoughts, which is a drawback, but you can’t get into my head, which is a—”

(which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say)

“—which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say?”

There were two patches on the jacket. One read U.S. ARMY and showed a bird—the eagle-bird, not the hoo-hoo bird. The other patch was a name: RANDALL FLAGG. Mordred discovered (also with no surprise) that he could read easily.

“Because, if you’re anything like your father—the red one, that is—then your mental powers may exceed mere communication.” The man in the parka tittered. He didn’t want Mordred to know he was afraid. Perhaps he’d convinced himself he wasn’t afraid, that he’d come here of his own free will. Maybe he had. It didn’t matter to Mordred one way or the other. Nor did the man’s plans, which jumbled and ran in his head like hot soup. Did the man really believe the “thinking-cap” had closed off his thoughts? Mordred looked closer, pried deeper, and saw the answer was yes. Very convenient.

“In any case, I believe a bit of protection to be very prudent. Prudence is always the wisest course; how else did I survive the fall of Farson and the death of Gilead? I wouldn’t want you to get in my head and walk me off a high building, now would I? Although why would you? You need me or someone, now that yon bucket of bolts has gone silent and you just a bah-bo who can’t tie his own clout across the crack of his shitty ass!”

The stranger—who was really no stranger at all—laughed. Mordred sat in the chair and watched him. On the side of the child’s cheek was a pink weal, for he’d gone to sleep with his small hand against the side of his small face.