The Dark Tower

Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth — perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn’t the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing: darkening, contracting, turning into something that was no longer human. It was the face of a psychotic clown.

“You,” he said, but before he could say anything else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the thing’s ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abruptly when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily.

Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out. Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo’s shadow fell over them.

“You bitch, I’ll teach you to interrupt a man when he’s on a—”

“Roland, let it go!” she screamed, and he did.

Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasn’t his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface things — not features at all but markings on some animal’s hide or an insect’s carapace.

“Stop!” he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicada’s buzz. “I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!”

“Heard it,” she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye.

Two

Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn’t want to know, as long as it didn’t make her sick. As long as it wasn’t poisonous.

Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo’s glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostat — a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartment — was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and filled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.

The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages — almost arms and legs — sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse than Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.

The tidy, well-lit cottage — like something out of a fairy-tale, and hadn’t she seen that from the first? — was now a dim and smoky peasant’s hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.

“Roland, are you all right?”