The Dark Tower

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 with CHARTERED in the destination window. Instead we pulled up to this empty freight depot with a sign reading SANTA 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 have a 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, there was 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 same kind of dark. It was darker 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.’