The Dark Tower

“Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guessyou like to sit down to read like anyone else,” Eddie said.

“Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy,” Nigelsaid. “I enjoy a good book. It’s part of my programming.”

“We’ll sleep six hours, then push on,”Roland told them.

Jake, meanwhile, was examining the booksmore closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines,occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. “He’s got all of Dickens, itlooks like,” he said. “Also Steinbeck… Thomas Wolfe… a lot of Zane Grey…somebody named Max Brand… a guy named Elmore Leonard… and the always popularSteve King.”

They all took time to look at the twoshelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them verylarge and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writer-beesince his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts inAtlantis and had been published in a year with which they were veryfamiliar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the onesabout them. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checkedthe copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing,however, because he had written so much.

Susa

“Still,” Eddie said after Nigel hadretired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room, “I betthere’s a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we couldpack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?”

“Maybe,” Roland said, “but we won’t. Theymight confuse us.”

“Why do you say so?”

Roland only shook his head. He didn’t knowwhy he said so, but he knew it was true.

Four

The Arc 16 Experimental Station’snerve-center was four levels down from the Extraction Room, the kitchen, andNigel’s study. One entered the Control Suite through a capsule-shapedvestibule. The vestibule could only be opened from the outside by using threeID slides, one after the other. The piped-in Muzak on this lowest level of theFedic Dogan sounded like Beatles tunes as rendered by The Comatose StringQuartet.

Inside the Control Suite were over a dozenrooms, but the only one with which we need concern ourselves was the one filledwith TV screens and security devices. One of these latter devices ran a smallbut vicious army of hunter-killer robots equipped with sneetches and laserpistols; another was supposed to release poison gas (the same kind Blaine hadused to slaughter the people of Lud) in the event of a hostile takeover. Which,in the view of Mordred Deschain, had happened. He had tried to activate boththe hunter-killers and the gas; neither had responded. Now Mordred had a bloodynose, a blue bruise on his forehead, and a swollen lower lip, for he’d fallenout of the chair in which he sat and rolled about on the floor, bellowingreedy, childish cries which in no way reflected the true depth of his fury.

To be able to see them on at least fivedifferent screens and not be able to kill or even hurt them! No wonder he wasin a fury! He had felt the living darkness closing in on him, the darknesswhich signaled his change, and had forced himself to be calm so the changewouldn’t happen. He had already discovered that the transformation from hishuman self to his spider self (and back again) consumed shocking amounts ofenergy. Later on that might not matter, but for the time being he had to becareful, lest he starve like a bee in a burned-over tract of forest.

What I’d show you is much more bizarre thananything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that your firstimpulse will be to laugh. That’s all right. Laugh if you must. Just don’t takeyour eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creaturewhich can do you damage. Remember that it came of two fathers, both of themkillers.

Five

Now, only a few hours after his birth,Mia’s chap already weighed twenty pounds and had the look of a healthysix-months’ baby. Mordred wore a single garment, a makeshift towel diaper whichNigel had put on when he had brought the baby his first meal of Dogan wildlife.The child needed a diaper, for he could not as yet hold his waste. Heunderstood that control over these functions would be his soon—perhapsbefore the day was out, if he continued to grow at his current rate—butit couldn’t happen soon enough to suit him. He was for the nonce imprisoned inthis idiotic infant’s body.

To be trapped in such a fashion washideous. To fall out of the chair and be capable of nothing more than lyingthere, waving his bruised arms and legs, bleeding and squalling! DNK 45932would have come to pick him up, could no more resist the commands of the King’sson than a lead weight dropped from a high window can resist the pull ofgravity, but Mordred didn’t dare call him. Already the brown bitch suspectedsomething wasn’t right with Nigel. The brown bitch was wickedly perceptive, andMordred himself was terribly vulnerable. He was able to control every piece ofmachinery in the Arc 16 station, mating with machinery was one of his manytalents, but as he lay on the floor of the room with CONTROL CENTER on the door(it had been called “The Head” back in the long-ago, before the world movedon), Mordred was coming to realize how few machines there were to control. Nowonder his father wanted to push down the Tower and begin again! This world wasbroken.

He’d needed to change back into the spiderin order to regain the chair, where he’d once again resumed his human shape…but by the time he made it, his stomach was rumbling and his mouth was sourwith hunger. It wasn’t just changing that sucked up the energy, he’d come tosuspect; the spider was closer to his true form, and when he was in that shapehis metabolism ran hot and fast. His thoughts changed, as well, and there wasan attraction to that, because his human thoughts were colored by emotions(over which he seemed to have no control, although he supposed he might, intime) that were mostly unpleasant. As a spider, his thoughts weren’t realthoughts at all, at least not in the human sense; they were dark bellowingthings that seemed to rise out of some wet interior ground. They were about

(EAT)

and

(ROAM)

and

(RAPE)

and

(KILL)

The many delightful ways to do these thingsrumbled through the dan-tete’s rudimentary consciousness like huge headlightedmachines that went speeding unheeding through the world’s darkest weather. Tothink in such a way—to let go of his human half—was immenselyattractive, but he thought that to do so now, while he had almost no defenses,would get him killed.

And almost already had. He raised his rightarm—pink and smooth and perfectly naked—so he could look down athis right hip. This was where the brown bitch had shot him, and althoughMordred had grown considerably since then, had doubled both in length andweight, the wound remained open, seeping blood and some custardy stuff, darkyellow and stinking. He thought that this wound in his human body would neverheal. No more than his other body would ever be able to grow back the leg thebitch had shot off. And had she not stumbled—ka: aye, he had no doubt ofit—the shot would have taken his head off instead of his leg, and thenthe game would have been over, because—

There was a harsh, croaking buzz. He lookedinto the monitor that showed the other side of the main entry and saw thedomestic robot standing there with a sack in one hand. The sack was twitching,and the black-haired, clumsily diapered baby sitting at the banks of monitorsimmediately began to salivate. He reached out one endearingly pudgy hand andpunched a series of buttons. The security room’s curved outer door slid openand Nigel stepped into the vestibule, which was built like an airlock. Mordredwent immediately on to the buttons that would open the i