Characters in The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

… Old Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia.

Speaking in his many voices and laughing? Eddie thought. He looked at Susannah. She looked back and shrugged. “Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine,” the blood-stained woman said. Jeeves nodded somberly. “Ardis always was a fool when he were in drink. Blaine asked him some question.

He pushed it open, expecting to see a bright desert sky and a blue haze of mountains on the horizon. Instead he saw Belinda Stevens standing at one of the sinks, looking into the mirror above the basin and squeezing a pimple on her forehead. “Jesus Christ, do you mind?”

“Over it?” Roland asked. “The bridge over the Send still stands,” Aunt Talitha said, “or did twenty year ago.” “Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone,” Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation. “What sort of bridge?” the gunslinger asked.

The night. Big Charlie Wind came and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here. Maybe two hundred and fifty.” “Bulldink!” the twin cried. “You been chewing the weed!” “I’ll chew on you, Bill Tudbury, if you don’t shut up your honkin.

Congratulations? What in the hell did that mean? He flipped open the folder. A sheet of paper had been clipped to the first page of his Final Essay. It was headed FROM THE DESK OF BONITA AVERY, and Jake read the spiky, fountain-penned lines with growing amazement.

“Bring me my knife, Brandon, and mind you wipe that slut’s stink off it before you put it in my hand.” A short, bandy-legged man hopped to do as he had been bidden. The knife wouldn’t come free at first; it seemed caught on the unfortunate dark-haired woman’s breastbone.

… real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They’d had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the …

… the mono’s nose, so that if you looked at Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers would look like slyly drooping eyelids. White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted rectangle. To Eddie, …

We can get em if we all stick togeth—” “Sorry, guy,” Eddie murmured, and shot him in the chest. Clarabell/Ronald staggered backward, one hand going to his shirt. He stared at Eddie with huge eyes that told his tale with heartbreaking clarity: this wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Beauty, ain’t it? Oh, the Tick-Tock Man’s a trig cove, all right, and no mistake. (Where’s those goat-fucking drums? They should have started by now—if Copperhead’s forgot em, I’ll ram a stick so far up his arse he’ll taste bark.) Now look ahead of you, my delicious little squint.”

I will have a word to say about several of these excellent books—” As she spoke she gave a small stack of mimeographed sheets to David Surrey.

The gunslinger thought deeply in his strange fashion—that combination of dry pragmatism and wild intuition which had probably come from his strange grandmother, Deidre the Mad, and had kept him alive all these years after his old companions had passed.

“Boss!” “You go on up to the apartment. Tell Mom we’ll be in by four-thirty, quarter of five. But don’t say anything about The Mansion. She’d have a shit-fit. She thinks it’s haunted, too.” “You want me to tell her we’re going over Dewey’s?” Silence as Henry considered this. “Naw.

There had been more apples—baskets and baskets of them—stacked against the walls inside, and there had also been a scrawny old man named Dewlap, whose muscles writhed beneath his white skin like worms and whose job was to feed the apples, basket by basket, to the loose-jointed, clanking machine which …

Someone would really pound one and Mel would bellow, “Holy cow, he got all of that one! SEEYA LATER!” Well, the drunk had gotten all of Gloria Dean, holy cow, seeya later.

Gasher peered into the scarf and plucked forth a scrap of paper. “Gods bless Hoots,” he muttered. “Hoots takes care of me a right proper, he does.” He peered at the scrap, turning it this way and that, and then held it out to Jake.

Joanne Franks, the school secretary, appeared in the doorway of the Common Room with her small silver-plated bell in her hand. At The Piper School, all bells were rung by hand. Jake supposed that if you were a parent, that was one of its charms.

That’s the one that kept running his billyclub over the spokes of your wheelchair until you thought the sound would send you mad. There’s the one who called your friend Leon pinko-fag. And the one on the end, Susannah, is Jack Mort. “There. Those stones. Those men.”

But I know you were run over by a car. No! Yes. It happened on May 9th, at 8:25 A.M. You died less than a minute later. No! No! No! “John?” He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette, his French teacher, was standing there, looking a little concerned.

There was a series of unpleasantly wet smacking sounds to his left. He opened his eyes a crack, looked in that direction, and saw Little Lord Fauntleroy’s head just coming to a stop in the gutter. The dwarf’s eyes were still open, his mouth still fixed in its final snarl.

Yet not even this had solved the-problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride (“Yeah, always blame the man,” Eddie had grunted at this point).

The newspaper-grabber—he was wearing denims and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up—held it over his head and grinned. “Jump for it, Maryanne! Jump, girl, jump!” She stared at him with angry eyes, her cheeks flushed. “Give it to me!” she said. “Quit fooling around and give it back!

“Shut up, Mercy,” he replied. Like the woman, he spoke with a thick accent Susannah could barely understand. “They ain’t harriers, not these. There’s a Pube with em, I told you that—ain’t no harrier ever been travellin with a Pube.” Blind or not, she tried to pull away from him.

… have to move it out of Charlie’s berth, Mr. Briggs. Charlie needs a lube job this very afternoon.” “Charlie won’t be needing any more lube jobs, Engineer Bob,” said Mr. Briggs sadly. “This is his replacement—a brand-new Burlington Zephyr diesel loco. Once, Charlie was the best locomotive in the world, …

The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking. Mr. Harley, the headmaster, approached the podium and imparted a brief exordium about the importance of Finals Week, and how the grades they received would constitute another step upon The Great Road of Life.

Jake had an idea that personal appearances were pretty rare for Piper School teachers. He wondered what Mr. Bissette had left. His best guess was an invitation to talk with Mr. Hotchkiss, the school shrink. That would have scared him this morning, but not tonight.

It’s over. A great idea, except by period three he knew it wasn’t over; it was just beginning. He sat in Pre-Algebra, watching Mr. Knopf solving simple equations on the board, and realized with dawning horror that a whole new set of memories was surfacing in his mind.

I will telegraph the head office of The Mid-World Railway Company! I will telegraph the President, Mr. Raymond Martin, myself! I know him, because he once gave me a Good Service Award, and afterwards Charlie and I took his little daughter for a ride.

She might call Mrs. Bunkowski. Tell her . . . tell her we’re goin down to Dahlie’s to get Hoodsie Rockets. She’ll believe that. Ask her for a coupla bucks, too.” “She won’t give me any money. Not two days before payday.” “Bullshit. You can get it out of her.

… because God had bent down to pick up a peanut; it had happened (as Mrs. Dean frequently told her sons) because there had been no one around to Watch Out for Gloria. Henry’s job was to make sure nothing like that ever happened to Eddie. That was his job and …

He knew from his Uncle Reg, who had worked on both the George Washington and Triborough bridges as a painter, that the hangers and overhead cables were “spun” from thousands of steel threads. On this bridge, the spin was finally letting go.

Well, I guess each of us hears someone talking, he had said at last, and you can bet your bottom dollar on one thing, sweetie: each of us—including this here Reverend Murdock—hears that voice …

She looked both terrified and confused. “Be they harriers, Si?” she cried in a cracked, quavering voice. “You’ll have us killed yet, I’ll warrant!” “Shut up, Mercy,” he replied. Like the woman, he spoke with a thick accent Susannah could barely understand. “They ain’t harriers, not these.

He looked into Mr. Harley’s Spoken Arts class and saw Stan Dorfman—one of those acquaintances who were not quite friends—beginning his Final Speech. Stan looked scared to death, but Jake could have told Stan he didn’t have the slightest idea what fear—real fear—was all about. I died. No. I didn’t.

Of all the Engineers who work for Mid-World, you are the best. And my daughter Susannah has never forgotten that you let her pull old Charlie’s whistle.” But Engineer Bob said that if he couldn’t pilot Charlie, his days as a trainman were done.

He told them about Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter, in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town. “Holy crispy crap!” Eddie said in a low, shaky voice.

“Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?” she asked. “Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?” Well, Eddie thought of saying, there was this bear . . . He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.

“I told her about that laugh,” Tick-Tock said. His eyes shifted to the other woman, a heavyset redhead who looked like a long-haul trucker. “Didn’t I, Tilly?” “Ay,” Tilly said at once. Her eyes were lustrous with fear and excitement, and she licked her lips obsessively.

It was like being able to remember forward in time. He bowled only two strings—the first a 96, the second an 87. Timmy looked at his sheet when he turned it in at the counter. and shook his head. “You’re having an off-day today, champ,” he said.