"Be it ever so humble, et cet'ra," Joe said, and ushered them into his kitchen. It was paneled in knotty pine which was actually plastic, Susannah saw when she got closer. And it was delightfully warm. The name on the electric stove was Rossco, a brand she'd never heard of. The fridge was an Amana and had a special little door set into the front, above the handle. She leaned closer and saw the words MAGIC ICE. "This thing makes ice cubes?" she asked, delighted.
"Well, no, not exactly," Joe said. "It's the freezer that makes em, beauty; that thing on the front just drops em into your drink."
This struck her funny, and she laughed. She looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with his old fiendish grin, and that made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell of the kitchen was wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice.
Roland was looking up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. "Yar, yar, I got all the 'lectric," he said. "Hot-air furnace, too, ain't it nice? And nobody ever sends me a bill! The genny's in a shed round to t'other side. It's a Honda, and quiet as Sunday morning! Even when you get right up on top of its little shed, you don't hear nuffink but mmmmmm. Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it needs maintaining, which hasn't been but twice in all the time I've been here. Nawp, Joey's lyin, he'll soon be dyin. Three times, it's been. Three in all."
"Who's Stuttering Bill?" Susannah asked, just as Roland was asking "How long have you been here?"
Joe Collins laughed. "One at a time, me foine new friends, one at a time!" He had set his stick aside to struggle out of his coat, put his weight on his bad leg, made a low snarling sound, and nearly fell over. Would have fallen over, had Roland not steadied him.
"Thankee, thankee, thankee," Joe said. "Although I tell you what, it wouldn't have been the first time I wound up with my nose on that lernoleum! But, as you saved me a tumble, it's your question I'll answer first. I've been here, Odd Joe of Odd's Lane, just about seb'nteen years. The only reason I can't tell you bang-on is that for awhile there, time got pretty goddam funny, if you know what I mean."
"We do," Susannah said. "Believe me, we do."
Collins was now divesting himself of a sweater, and beneath it was another. Susannah's first impression had been of a stout old man who stopped just short of fat. Now she saw that a lot of what she'd taken for fat was nothing but padding. He wasn't as desperately scrawny as his old horse, but he was a long shout from stout.
"Now Stuttering Bill," the old man continued, removing the second sweater, "he be a robot. Cleans the house as well as keepin my generator runnin... and a-course he's the one that does the plowin. When I first come here, he only stuttered once in awhile; now it's every second or third word. What I'll do when he finally runs down I dunno." To Susannah's ear, he sounded singularly unworried about it.
"Maybe he'll get better, now that the Beam's working right again," she said.
"He might last a little longer, but I doubt like hell that he'll get any better" Joe said. "Machines don't heal the way living things do." He'd finally reached his thermal undershirt, and here die stripdown stopped. Susannah was grateful. Looking at the somehow ghasdy barrel of the horse's ribs, so close beneath die short gray fur, had been enough. She had no wish to see die master's, as well.
"Off with yer coats and your leggings," Joe said. "I'll get yez eggnog or whatever else ye'd like in a minute or two, but first I'd show yer my livin room, for it's my pride, so it is."
SIX
There was a rag rug on the living room floor that would have looked at home in Gramma Holmes's house, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a table beside it. The table was heaped with magazines, paperback books, a pair of spectacles, and a brown bottle containing God knew what sort of medicine. There was a television, although Susannah couldn't imagine what old Joe might possibly watch on it (Eddie and Jake would have recognized the VCR sitting on the shelf beneath). But what took all of Susannah's attention-and Roland's, as well-was the photograph on one of die walls. It had been thumbtacked there slighdy askew, in a casual fashion that seemed (to Susannah, at least) almost sacrilegious.
It was a photograph of the Dark Tower.
Her breatii deserted her. She worked her way over to it, barely feeling the knots and nubbles of die rag rug beneadi her palms, then raised her arms. "Roland, pick me up!"
He did, and she saw diat his face had gone dead pale except for two hard balls of color burning in his thin cheeks. His eyes were blazing. The Tower stood against the darkening sky with sunset painting the hills behind it orange, the slitted windows rising in their eternal spiral. From some of those windows there spilled a dim and eldritch glow. She could see balconies jutting out from the dark stone sides at every two or three stories, and the squat doors that opened onto them, all shut.
Locked as well, she had no doubt. Before the Tower was the field of roses, Can'-Ka No Rey, dim but still lovely in the shadows.
Most of the roses were closed against the coming dark but a few still peeped out like sleepy eyes.