The Dark Tower (Page 50)
Eventually he, Mordred, will put it out. And in the darkness, he will have his pleasure.
Chapter VIII:NOTES FROM THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE
ONE
Eddie looked at the others. Jake and Roland were sitting on the sleeping-bags which had been left for them. Oy lay curled up at Jake’s feet. Susannah was parked comfortably on the seat of her Cruisin Trike. Eddie nodded, satisfied, and pushed the tape recorder’s PLAY button. The reels spun… there was silence… they spun… and silence… then, after clearing his throat, Ted Brautigan began to speak. They listened for over four hours, Eddie replacing each empty reel with the next full one, not bothering to rewind.
No one suggested they stop, certainly not Roland, who listened with silent fascination even when his hip began to throb again. Roland thought he understood more, now; certainly he knew they had a real chance to stop what was happening in the compound below them. The knowledge frightened him because their chances of success were slim. The feeling of kashume made that clear. And one did not really understand the stakes until one glimpsed the goddess in her white robe, the bitch-goddess whose sleeve fell back to reveal her comely white arm as she beckoned: Come to me, run to me. Yes, it’s possible, you may gain your goal, you may win, so run to me, give me your whole heart. And if I break it? Ifone of you falls short, falls into the pit ofcoffah (the place your neiv friends call hell)? Too bad for you.
Yes, if one of them fell into coffah and burned within sight of the fountains, that would be too bad, indeed. And the bitch in the white robe? Why, she’d only put her hands on her hips, and throw back her head, and laugh as the world ended. So much depended on the man whose weary, rational voice now filled the cave. The Dark Tower itself depended on him, for Brautigan was a man of staggering powers.
The surprising thing was that the same could be said of Sheemie.
TWO
"Test, one two… test, one two… test, test, test. This is Ted Stevens Brautigan and this is a test…"
A brief pause. The reels turned, one full, the other now beginning to fill.
"Okay, good. Great, in fact. I wasn’t sure this thing would work, especially here, but it seems fine. I prepared for this by trying to imagine you four-five, counting the boy’s little friend-listening to me, because I’ve always found visualization an excellent technique when preparing some sort of presentation.
Unfortunately, in this case it doesn’t work. Sheemie can send me very good mental pictures-brilliant ones, in fact-but Roland is the only one of you he’s actually seen, and him not since the fall of Gilead, when both of them were very young. No disrespect, fellows, but I suspect the Roland now coming toward Thunderclap looks hardly anything like the young man my friend Sheemie so worshipped.
"Where are you now, Roland? In Maine, looking for the writer? The one who also created me, after a fashion? In New York, looking for Eddie’s wife? Are any of you even still alive? I know the chances of you reaching Thunderclap aren’t good; ka is drawing you to the Devar-Toi, but a very powerful anti-ka, set in motion by the one you call the Crimson King, is working against you and your tet in a thousand ways. All the same…
"Was it Emily Dickinson who called hope the thing with feathers? I can’t remember. There are a great many things I can’t remember any longer, but it seems I still remember how to fight. Maybe that’s a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing.
"Has it crossed your mind to wonder where I’m recording this, lady and gentlemen?"
It hadn’t. They simply sat, mesmerized by the slightly dusty sound of Brautigan’s voice, passing a bottle of Perrier and a tin filled with graham crackers back and forth.
"I’ll tell yon," Brautigan went on, "partly because the three of you from America will surely find it amusing, but mostly because you may find it useful in formulating a plan to destroy what’s going on in Algul Siento.
"As I speak, I’m sitting on a chair made of slab chocolate.
The seat is a big blue marshmallow, and I doubt if the air mattresses we’re planning to leave you could be any more comfortable.
You’d think such a seat would be sticky, but it’s not. The walls of this room-and the kitchen I can see if I look through the gumdrop arch to my left-are made of green, yellow, and red candy. Lick the green one and you taste lime. Lick the red one and you taste raspberry. Although taste (in any sense of that slippery word) had very little to do with Sheemie’s choices, or so I believe; I think he simply has a child’s love of bright primary colors."
Roland was nodding and smiling a little.
"Although I must tell you," the voice from the tape recorder said dryly, "I’d be happy to have at least one room with a slightly more reserved decor. Something in blue, perhaps. Earth-tones would be even better.
"Speaking of earth tones, the stairs are also chocolate. The banister’s a candy-cane. One cannot, however, say ‘the stairs going up to the second floor,’ because there is no second floor. Through the window you can see cars that look suspiciously like bonbons going by, and the street itself looks like licorice. But if you open the door and take more than a single step toward Twizzler Avenue, you find yourself back where you started. In what we may as well call ‘the real world,’ for want of a better term.
"Gingerbread House-which is what we call it because that’s what you always smell in here, warm gingerbread, just out of the oven-is as much Dinky’s creation as it is Sheemie’s. Dink wound up in the Corbett House dorm with Sheemie, and heard Sheemie crying himself to sleep one night. A lot of people would have passed by on the other side in a case like that, and I realize that no one in the world looks less like the Good Samaritan than Dinky Earnshaw, but instead of passing by he knocked on the door of Sheemie’s suite and asked if he could come in.
"Ask him about it now and Dinky will tell you it was no big deal. ‘I was new in the place, I was lonely, I wanted to make some friends,’ he’ll say. ‘Hearing a guy bawling like that, it hit me that he might want a friend, too.’ As though it were the most natural thing in the world. In a lot of places that might be true, but not in Algul Siento. And you need to understand that above all else,
I think, if you’re going to understand us. So forgive me if I seem to dwell on the point.
"Some of the hume guards call us morks, after a space alien in some television comedy. And morks are the most selfish people on Earth. Antisocial? Not exactly. Some are extremely social, but only insofar as it will get them what they currently want or need. Very few morks are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are morks, if you understand what I’m saying. The most famous, and thank God the low men never brought him over here, was a mass murderer named Ted Bundy.
"If you have an extra cigarette or two, no one can be more sympathetic-or admiring-than a mork in need of a smoke.
Once he’s got it, though, he’s gone.
"Most morks-I’m talking ninety-eight or -nine out of a hundred-would have heard crying behind that closed door and never so much as slowed down on their way to wherever.
Dinky knocked and asked if he could come in, even though he was new in the place and justifiably confused (he also thought he was going to be punished for murdering his previous boss, but that’s a story for another day).
"And we should look at Sheemie’s side of it. Once again, I’d say ninety-eight or even ninety-nine morks out of a hundred would have responded to a question like that by shouting ‘Get lost!’ or even ‘Fuck off!’ Why? Because we are exquisitely aware that we’re different from most people, and that it’s a difference most people don’t like. Any more than the Neanderthals liked the first Cro-Magnons in the neighborhood, I would imagine.
Morks don’t like to be caught off-guard."
A pause. The reels spun. All four of them could sense Brautigan thinking hard.
"No, that’s not quite right," he said at last. "What morks don’t like is to be caught in an emotionally vulnerable state.
Angry, happy, in tears or fits of hysterical laughter, anything like that. It would be like you fellows going into a dangerous situation without your guns.
"For a long time, I was alone here. I was a mork who caied, whether I liked it or not. Then there was Sheemie, brave enough to accept comfort if comfort was offered. And Dink, who was willing to reach out. Most morks are selfish introverts masquerading as rugged individualists-they want the world to see them as Dan’l Boone types-and the Algul staff loves it, believe me. No community is easier to govern than one that rejects the very concept of community. Do you see why I was attracted to Sheemie and Dinky, and how lucky I was to find them?"
Susannah’s hand crept into Eddie’s. He took it and squeezed it gently.
"Sheemie was afraid of the dark," Ted continued. "The low men-I call em all low men, although there are humes and taheen at work here as well as can-toi-have a dozen sophisticated tests for psychic potential, but they couldn’t seem to realize that they had caught a halfwit who was simply afraid of the dark. Their bad luck.
"Dinky understood the problem right away, and solved it by telling Sheemie stories. The first ones were fairy-tales, and one of them was ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ Sheemie was fascinated by the idea of a candy house, and kept asking Dinky for more details.
So, you see, it was Dinky who actually thought of the chocolate chairs with the marshmallow seats, the gumdrop arch, and the candy-cane banister. For a little while there was a second floor; it had the beds of the Three Bears in it. But Sheemie never cared much for that story, and when it slipped his mind, the upstairs of Casa Gingerbread…" Ted Brautigan chuckled.