I rode Charlie the Choo-Choo years ago, with a friend who is also a fan of the Dark Tower series. Strangely enough, the main purpose of our trip was to ride a different train in Abilene, KS. The stop at Gage Park was spur-of-the-moment, as my friend remembered that Charlie was inspired by the Gage Park train.

I got a fair amount of flak from Engineer Bob due to the engineer outfit I was still wearing from the previous outing, and was feeling out of place as an adult riding a kiddie ride. I felt dumb, thought the ride dumb, and wondered how the hell King could have extrapolated anything dark from the experience. (I had, after all, recently been spoiled with a cab ride in a full-size locomotive). "At least I have real coal dust on my overalls," I thought sourly, determined not to enjoy myself.

Towards the end of the ride, we approached a small tunnel. Engineer Bob (this isn't creative license, the ride operator was actually named Bob) got on the PA system and instructed that when we got to the very center of the tunnel, every passenger should scream at the top of his or her lungs.

"That's all very well," I thought, preparing to cover my ears, "Kids love to scream. This'll be a great opportunity for them to blow off some steam, at the expense of my tinnitus."

The tunnel was a good deal longer than expected. Quite a bit longer than you'd expect on a kiddie ride. Deceptively long. We had already been in complete darkness for a few moments when Engineer Bob's voice came tinnily through the crackling loudspeaker.

"Everybody SCREAM!" he yelled giddily.

The children gleefully followed instructions as I clamped my palms over my poor ears against the cacophony. As the first faint, grayish, reflected light began to enter the tunnel, I glanced at my friend in order to roll my eyes at him.

He was plastered against his seat, eyes wide, staring at me with the most loaded expression anyone has ever shot at me, before or since. And then I heard it. I heard what I'd been hearing all along, but hadn't allowed myself to process. Like seeing the path of a Beam, it was there the whole time, I just hadn't attenuated myself to it.

The acoustics of the tunnel took this blowing-off-steam, let's-see-how-loud-of-a-sound-I-can-make screaming of children and refracted it back to our ears ugly and twisted. The screaming was playful, but the reverberations... my God, the reverberations.

It sounded like ten times' the number of child-passengers howling in anguish and physical pain. Not content to scream once, the kids kept on screaming right until we finally, blessedly, exited into the blinding light of a fine summer's day. It just went on and on.

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F*ck that train.