The question was, did it matter?
"You couldn't call it heaven, because there were no clouds and no choirs of angels," Joe said, "but I decided it was some sort of an afterlife, just the same." He had wandered about. He found food, he found a horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands of people, some friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he'd picked up some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the Beams and the Tower. At one point he'd tried to cross the Badlands, he said, but he'd gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all sorts of sores and weird blemishes.
"I got a boil on my ass, and that was the final touch," he said.
"Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found this place, which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me.
He's got a litde doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom."
Roland wanted to know if Joe had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad creature made his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six months ago there had been a terrible storm ("a real boilermaker") that drove him down into his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or no genny, and as he cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some terrible creature was close by, and that it might at any moment touch Joe's mind and follow his thoughts to where he was hiding.
"You know what I felt like?" he asked them.
Roland and Susannah shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation.
"Snack-food," Joe said. "Potential snack-food."
This part of his story's true, Susannah thought. He may have changed it around a little, but basically it's true. And if she had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible.
"What did you do?" Roland asked.
"Went to sleep," he said. "It's a talent I've always had, like doing impressions-although I don't do famous voices in my act, because they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless you're Rich Little, at least. Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that's what I did down in the cellar.
When I woke up again the lights were back on and the... the whatever-it-was was gone. I know about the Crimson King, of course, I see folks from time to time still-nomads like you three, for the most part-and they talk about him. Usually they fork the sign of the evil eye and spit between their fingers when they do. You think that was him, huh? You think the Crimson King actually passed by Odd's Lane on his way to the Tower." Then, before they had a chance to answer: "Well, why not? Tower Road's the main throughfare, after all. It goes all the way there."
You know it was him, Susannah thought. What game are you playing, Joe?
The thin cry that was most definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it was Mordred, though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had gone to hide from the Crimson King... or so he'd said. Who was down there now? And was he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner?
"It hasn't been a bad life," Joe was saying. "Not the life I expected, not by any manner or means, but I got a theory-the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger."
Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, 'You were a court jester and the customers in these inns were your court."
Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned.
Had she seen his teeth before? They had been doing a lot of laughing and she should have seen them, but she couldn't remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn't have the mush-mouth sound of someone whose teeth are mosdy gone
(such people had consulted with her father on many occasions, most of them in search of artificial replacements). If she'd had to guess earlier on, she would have said he had teeth but they were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins, and-
And what's the matter with you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely didn't grow afresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You're letting your imagination run away with you.
Was she? Well, it was possible. And maybe that thin cry was nothing but the sound of the wind in the eaves at the front of the house, after all.