Black House

"Nor is it about Twinners," Parkus says. "You got to get that idea out of your mind. That’s just something that has to do with your world and the world of the Territories — a link. You can’t kill some hardcase over here and end the career of your cannibal over there. And if you kill him over there, in Wisconsin, the thing inside will just jump to another host."

"The thing — ?"

"When it was in Albert Fish, Fish called it the Monday Man. Fellow you’re after calls it Mr. Munshun. Both are only ways of trying to say something that can’t be pronounced by any earthly tongue on any earthly world."

"How many worlds are there, Speedy?"

"Many," Parkus says, looking into the fire. "And this business concerns every one of them. Why else do you think I’ve been after you like I have? Sending you feathers, sending you robins’ eggs, doing every damned thing I could to make you wake up."

Jack thinks of Judy, scratching on walls until the tips of her fingers were bloody, and feels ashamed. Speedy has been doing much the same thing, it seems. "Wake up, wake up, you dunderhead," he says.

Parkus seems caught between reproof and a smile. "For sure you must have seen me in the case that sent you running out of L.A."

"Ah, man — why do you think I went?"

"You ran like Jonah, when God told him to go preach against the wickedness in Nineveh. Thought I was gonna have to send a whale to come and swallow you up."

"I feel swallowed," Jack tells him.

In a small voice, Sophie says: "I do, too."

"We’ve all been swallowed," says the man with the gun on his hip. "We’re in the belly of the beast, like it or not. It’s ka, which is destiny and fate. Your Fisherman, Jack, is now your ka. Our ka. This is more than murder. Much more."

And Jack sees something that frankly scares the shit out of him. Lester Parker, a.k.a. Speedy, a.k.a. Parkus, is himself scared almost to death.

"This business concerns the Dark Tower," he says.

Beside Jack, Sophie gives a low, desperate cry of terror and lowers her head. At the same time she raises one hand and forks the sign of the Evil Eye at Parkus, over and over.

That gentleman doesn’t seem to take it amiss. He simply sets to work turning the birds again on their sticks. "Listen to me, now," he says. "Listen, and ask as few questions as you can. We still have a chance to get Judy Marshall’s son back, but time is blowing in our teeth."

"Talk," Jack says.

Parkus talks. At some point in his tale he judges the birds done and serves them out on flat stones. The meat is tender, almost falling off the small bones. Jack eats hungrily, drinking deep of the sweet water from Parkus’s waterskin each time it comes around to him. He wastes no more time comparing dead children to dead grouse. The furnace needs to be stoked, and he stokes it with a will. So does Sophie, eating with her fingers and licking them clean without the slightest reserve or embarrassment. So, in the end, does Wendell Green, although he refuses to enter the circle of old stones. When Parkus tosses him a golden-brown grouse, however, Wendell catches it with remarkable adroitness and buries his face in the moist meat.

"You asked how many worlds," Parkus begins. "The answer, in the High Speech, is da fan: worlds beyond telling." With one of the blackened sticks he draws a figure eight on its side, which Jack recognizes as the Greek symbol for infinity.

"There is a Tower that binds them in place. Think of it as an axle upon which many wheels spin, if you like. And there is an entity that would bring this Tower down. Ram Abbalah."

At these words, the flames of the fire seem to momentarily darken and turn red. Jack wishes he could believe that this is only a trick of his overstrained mind, but cannot. "The Crimson King," he says.

"Yes. His physical being is pent in a cell at the top of the Tower, but he has another manifestation, every bit as real, and this lives in Can-tah Abbalah — the Court of the Crimson King."

"Two places at once." Given his journeying between the world of America and the world of the Territories, Jack has little trouble swallowing this concept.

"Yes."

"If he — or it — destroys the Tower, won’t that defeat his purpose? Won’t he destroy his physical being in the process?"

"Just the opposite: he’ll set it free to wander what will then be chaos . . . din-tah . . . the furnace. Some parts of Mid-World have fallen into that furnace already."

"How much of this do I actually need to know?" Jack asks. He is aware that time is fleeting by on his side of the wall, as well.

"Hard telling what you need to know and what you don’t," Parkus says. "If I leave out the wrong piece of information, maybe all the stars go dark. Not just here, but in a thousand thousand universes. That’s the pure hell of it. Listen, Jack — the King has been trying to destroy the Tower and set himself free for time out of mind. Forever, mayhap. It’s slow work, because the Tower is bound in place by crisscrossing force beams that act on it like guy wires. The Beams have held for millennia, and would hold for millennia to come, but in the last two hundred years — that’s speaking of time as you count it, Jack; to you, Sophie, it would be Full-Earth almost five hundred times over — "

"So long," she says. It’s almost a sigh. "So very long."

"In the great sweep of things, it’s as short as the gleam of a single match in a dark room. But while good things usually take a long time to develop, evil has a way of popping up full-blown and ready-made, like Jack out of his box. Ka is a friend to evil as well as to good. It embraces both. And, speaking of Jack . . ." Parkus turns to him. "You’ve heard of the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, of course?"