Henry Leyden

Henry Leyden is a fictional character within the pages of the Stephen King and Peter Straub collaboration "Black House", itself a sequel to their first joint effort, "The Talisman".

Henry Leyden has been blind since birth, but almost completely compensates for it with his incredible sense of hearing. In fact, he was able to determine that Jack Sawyer was the son of Lily Cavanaugh, a famous former actress, just by hearing him speak and by remembering the sound of her voice from a movie she starred in long ago.

Henry has a secret that very, very few people in the town of Tamarak, Wisconsin know about: due to his excellent hearing and his expertise in the intricacies of music and sound, he has managed to create not one but four distinct radio personalities, by which means he runs a series of shows across the state that cater to completely different demographics and which the public-at-large is completely unaware of:

*Symphonic Stan, a Zoot Suit-wearing Big Band era DJ whose soothing voice and words conjure up images of a bygone era;
*The Wisconsin Rat, the thoroughly abrasive host of a college campus punk-rock show who often screams obscenities almost as loudly as the music he plays;
*Henry "The Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby" Shake, a silver-tongued jazz historian and affcionado;

and

*George Rathbun, perhaps the most famous and beloved broadcaster in Wisconsin, a bombastic but good-natured sports maven whose deep, booming voice causes most listeners to believe they are listening to a chain-smoking, muscle shirt wearing, beer-swilling, 250-plus pound bear of a man in his later forties -as opposed to the whip thin, well dressed, soft-spoken, fine wine drinking Henry, who is in his .

Ironically, none of his personas are actually done in his natural voice, and very few people outside of his radio station colleagues, friends and family, has actually seen his face (apart from his appearances in his 'Symphonic Stan' persona, which is done so skillfully that those who see him in this persona believe that they are dealing with a sighted man and therefore make no connection between "Symphonic Stan" and the town's sole blind person).

Relevance of the Character

Henry Leyden, in his own way, is a more central character to the novel Black House than even Jack Sawyer (who has moved here to Wisconsin after retiring in his mid-thirties as a highly accomplished L.A cop, some twenty years after his boyhood adventures and trials in "The Talisman").

Goaded on by his own successes and the nearly complete inability of the French Landing Police to catch or even identify him, The Fisherman begins making a series of calls to the local police departments, actually telling them the location of the bodies of the children that he's killed. At one point, Jack Sawyer asks Henry Leyden to use his preternaturally sharp ears to listen to the police tapes and see if the voice is familiar to him.

In doing so, Henry immediately connects the voice of the Fisherman to the voice of one of the elderly residents at Maxton' Elderly Care (where he'd previously entertained the elderly residents of the facility in his Symphonic Stan persona).

Unfortunately for Henry, the Fisherman is empowered and watched over by supernatural forces (including the Crimson King himself) and in this manner he immediately learns of Henry's discovery. The Fisherman fatally wounds Henry in his home, but not before Henry is able to severely wound the killer in turn and, just before dying, make a final recording in his home studio whereby he implicates Charles Burnside, by voice match, in the killings.

Had Henry failed in badly wounding his assailant, the Fisherman, at full strength, would have had no problem at all subduing and spiriting away young Tyler Marshall before Jack and his friends could find and rescue the child (imprisoned within one of the Dimensional corridors of the Black House itself) and delivering him to Mr. Munshun, who is an agent of the Crimson King and under orders to bring the boy alive to the King as he has the potential to be one of the most powerful Breakers ever, perhaps rivalling even the abilities of Mordred Deschain himself.

As it was, thanks to Henry's success in badly wounding Burnside, the captive Tyler was later able to draw on a hidden mystic energy of his own, and subsequently barely managed to kill the greatly weakened Fisherman with his bare hands.

Furthermore, had the boy been delivered to the Crimson King, he would have been put to work at Breaking the last of the Beams...and with the boy's energies added to those of the other Breakers, the last of the Beams would almost certainly have fallen -resulting in the destruction of all of the Universes in Stephen King's cosmology -long before Roland Deschain would even have been able to reach the Breaker facility and shut it down.

References

* Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub
* The Dark Tower by Stephen King