The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower #7)

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower #7) Page 28

ONE

Three weeks after the dream of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more woods below.

One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more sled than travois.

Oy raced back and forth between Roland and Susannah, as if keeping a constant watch. His fur was thick and sleek from cold weather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the three of them were currently covering might have been a meadow in die warmer seasons, but now the ground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, because their way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worst was over. And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad-at least, not yet. There was plenty of game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire, and on the four occasions when the weather turned nasty and blizzards blew, they had simply laid up and waited for the storms to wear themselves out on the wooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did, although the angriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more took to the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on the ground. In the open places where the shrieking nor'east wind had been able to rage fully, there were drifts like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tall pines almost to their tops.

After their first day in the White Lands, with Roland struggling to pull her (and then the snow had been less than a foot deep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months crossing those high, forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snow-shoes, so that first night she'd set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error process ("By guess and by gosh" was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger pronounced her third effort a success. The frames were made of limber birch branches, the centers of woven, overlapping deerskin strips. To Roland they looked like teardrops.

"How did you know to do this?" he asked her after his first day of wearing them. The increase in distance covered was nothing short of amazing, especially once he had learned to walk with a kind of rolling, shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the latticed surfaces.

"Television," Susannah said. "There used to be this program I watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Sergeant Preston didn't have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he did have his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the guy's snowshoes looked like." She pointed to the ones Roland was wearing. "That's the best I could do."

"You did fine," he said, and the sincerity she heard in his simple compliment made her tingle all over. This was not necessarily the way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for that matter) to make her feel, but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature or nurture, and wasn't sure she wanted to know.

"They'll be all right as long as they don't fall apart," she allowed. Her first effort had done just that.

"I don't feel the strips loosening," he told her. "Stretching a litde, maybe, but that's all."

Now, as they crossed the great open space, that third pair of snowshoes was still holding together, and because she felt as though she'd made some sort of contribution, Susannah was able to let Roland pull her along without too much guilt. She did wonder about Mordred from time to time, and one night about ten days after they had crossed the snow-boundary, she came out and asked Roland to tell her what he knew. What prompted her was his declaration that there was no need to set a watch, at least for awhile; they could both get a full ten hours' worth of sleep, if that's what their bodies could use. Oy would wake them if they needed waking.

Roland had sighed and looked into the fire for nearly a full minute, his arms around his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them. She had just about decided he wasn't going to answer at all when he said, "Still following, but falling further and further behind. Struggling to eat, struggling to catch up, struggling most of all to stay warm."

"To stay warm?" To Susannah this seemed hard to believe.

There were trees all around them.

"He has no matches and none of the Sterno stuff, either. I believe that one night-early on, this would have been-he came upon one of our fires with live coals still under the ash, and he was able to carry some with him for a few days after that and so have a fire at night. It's how the ancient rock-dwellers used to carry fire on their journeys, or so I was told."

Susannah nodded. She had been taught roughly the same thing in a high school science class, although the teacher had admitted a lot of what they knew about how Stone Age people got along wasn't true knowledge at all, but only informed guesswork. She wondered how much of what Roland had just told her was also guesswork, and so she asked him.

"It's not guessing, but I can't explain it. If it's the touch,

Susannah, it's not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although... do you believe we have dreams sometimes we don't remember after we awaken?"

"Yes." She thought of telling him about rapid eye movement, and the REM sleep experiments she'd read about in Look magazine, then decided it would be too complex. She contented herself with saying that she was sure folks had dreams every single night that they didn't remember.

"Mayhap I see him and hear him in those," Roland said.

"All I know is that he's struggling to keep up. He knows so litde about the world that it's really a wonder he's still alive at all."

"Do you feel sorry for him?"

"No. I can't afford pity, and neither can you."

But his eyes had left hers when he said that, and she thought he was lying. Maybe he didn't want to feel sorry for Mordred, but she was sure he did, at least a little. Maybe he wanted to hope that Mordred would die on their trail-certainly there were plenty of chances it would happen, with hypothermia being the most likely cause-but Susannah didn't think he was quite able to do it. They might have outrun ka, but she reckoned that blood was still thicker than water.

There was something else, however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She knew, because she could now feel it beating in her own head, bodi sleeping and waking. It was the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now.

She had no idea what they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got there, but she found she no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was to see it. The idea of entering it was still more than her imagination could deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that. And she thought that seeing it would be enough.

TWO

They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland's heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again.

Bright blue holes sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at work, constantly pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from horizon to horizon, and had a low full look both of them now recognized. More snow was on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst they'd seen. The wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to numb all his exposed skin

(after three weeks of diligent needlework, that amounted to not much more than his forehead and the tip of his nose). The gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past them and then on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers.

"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully.

Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except once, in the ntland of Mejis), grunted. He knew what would be beautiful to him: decent cover when the storm overtook them, something more than just a thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when the latest gust of wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band, stepped out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her. Dressed in hides from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a man.

"What do you make of that?" he asked her.

The wind kicked up again, harder than ever, at first obscuring what he had seen. When it dropped, a hole opened above them and the sun shone briefly through, lighting the snowfield with billions of diamond-chip sparkles. Susannah shaded her eyes with one hand and looked long downhill. What she saw was an inverted T carved in the snow. The cross arm, closest to them

(but still at least two miles away) was relatively short, perhaps two hundred feet on either side. The long arm, however, was very long, going all the way to the horizon and then disappearing over it.

"Those are roads!" she said. "Someone's plowed a couple of roads down there, Roland!"

He nodded. "I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it. I see something else, as well."

"What? Your eyes are sharper than mine, and by a lot."

"When we get a little closer, you'll see for yourself."

He tried to rise and she tugged impatiently at his arm.

"Don't you play that game with me. What is it?"

"Roofs," he said, giving in to her. "I think there are cottages down there. Mayhap even a town."

"People? Are you saying people?"

"Well, it looks like there's smoke coming from one of the houses. Although it's hard to tell for sure with the sky so white."

She didn't know if she wanted to see people or not. Certainly such would complicate things. "Roland, we'll have to be careful."

"Yes," he said, and went back to the tow-band again. Before he picked it up, he paused to readjust his gunbelt, dropping the holster a bit so it lay more comfortably near his left hand.

An hour later they came to the intersection of the lane and the road. It was marked by a snowbank easily eleven feet high, one that had been built by some sort of plow. Susannah could see tread-marks, like those made by a bulldozer, pressed into the packed snow. Rising out of this hardpack was a pole.

The street sign on top was no different from those she'd seen in all sorts of towns; at intersections in New York City, for that matter.

The one indicating the short road said ODDS LANE.

It was the other that thrilled her heart, however.

TOWER ROAD,

it read.

THREE

All but one of the cottages clustered around the intersection were deserted, and many lay in half-buried heaps, broken beneath the weight of accumulating snow. One, however-it was about three-quarters of the way down the lefthand arm of Odd's Lane-was clearly different from the others. The roof had been mostly cleared of its potentially crushing weight of snow, and a path had been shoveled from the lane to the front door. It was from the chimney of this quaint, tree-surrounded cottage that the smoke was issuing, feather-white. One window was lit a wholesome butter-yellow, too, but it was the smoke diat captured Susannah's eye. As far as she was concerned, it was the final touch. The only question in her mind was who would answer the door when they knocked. Would it be Hansel or his sister Gretel? (And were those two twins? Had anyone ever searched the matter?) Perhaps it would be Little Red Riding Hood, or Goldilocks, wearing a guilty goatee of porridge.

"Maybe we should just pass it by," she said, aware that she had dropped her voice to a near-whisper, even though they were still on the high snowbank created by the plow. "Give it a miss and say thank ya." She gestured to the sign reading TOWER ROAD. "We've got a clear way, Roland-maybe we ought to take it."

"And if we should, do you think that Mordred will?" Roland asked. "Do you think he'll simply pass by and leave whoever lives there in peace?"

Here was a question that hadn't even occurred to her, and of course the answer was no. If Mordred decided he could kill whoever was in the cottage, he'd do it. For food if the inhabitants were edible, but food would only be a secondary consideration.

The woods behind them had been teeming with game, and even if Mordred hadn't been able to catch his own supper

(and in his spider form, Susannah was sure he would have been perfectly capable of doing that), diey had left the remains of their own meals at a good many camps. No, he would come out of the snowy uplands fed... but not happy. Not happy at all.

And so woe to whoever happened to be in his path.

On the other hand, she thought... only there was no other hand, and all at once it was too late, anyway. The front door of the cottage opened, and an old man came out onto the stoop.

He was wearing boots, jeans, and a heavy parka with a furlined hood. To Susannah this latter garment looked like something that might have been purchased at the Army-Navy Surplus Store in Greenwich Village.

The old man was rosy-cheeked, the picture of wintry good health, but he limped heavily, depending on the stout stick in his left hand. From behind his quaint little cottage with its fairy-tale plume of smoke came the piercing whinny of a horse.

"Sure, Lippy, I see em!" the old man cried, turning in that direction. "I got a'least one good eye left, ain't I?" Then he turned back to where Roland stood on the snowbank with Susannah and Oy flanking him. He raised his stick in a salute that seemed both merry and unafraid. Roland raised his own hand in return.

"Looks like we're in for some palaver whether we want it or not," said Roland.

"I know," she replied. Then, to the bumbler: "Oy, mind your manners now, you hear?"

Oy looked at her and then back at the old man without making a sound. On the subject of minding his manners he'd keep his own counsel awhile, it seemed.

The old man's bad leg was clearly very bad-"Next door to nuthin," Daddy Mose Carver would have said-but he got on well enough with his stick, moving in a sideways hopping gait that Susannah found both amusing and admirable. "Spry as a cricket" was another of Daddy Mose's many sayings, and perhaps this one fit yonder old man better. Certainly she saw no harm or danger in a white-haired fellow (the hair was long and baby-fine, hanging to the shoulders of his anorak) who had to hop along on a stick. And, as he drew closer, she saw that one of his eyes was filmed white with a cataract. The pupil, which was faintly visible, seemed to look dully off to their left. The other, however, regarded the newcomers with lively interest as the inhabitant of the cottage hopped down Odd's Lane toward them.

The horse whinnied again and the old man waved his stick wildly against the white, low-lying sky. "Shut up ya haybox, ya turdfactory, y'old clap-cunt gammer-gurt, ain't you ever seen cump'ny before? Was ya born in a barn, hee-hee? (For if y'wasn't, I'm a blue-eyed baboon, which there ain't no such thing!)"

Roland snorted with genuine laughter, and the last of Susannah's watchful apprehension departed. The horse whinnied again from the outbuilding behind the cottage-it was nowhere near grand enough to be called a barn-and the old man waved his stick at it once more, almost falling to the snowpack in the process. His awkward but nonetheless rapid gait had now brought him halfway to their location. He saved himself from what would have been a nasty tumble, took a large sidle-hop using the stick for a prop, then waved it cheerily in their direction.

"Hile, gunslingers!" the old man shouted. His lungs, at least, were admirable. "Gunslingers on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, so y'are, so ya must be, for don't I see the big irons with the yaller grips? And the Beam be back, fair and strong, for I feel it and Lippy do, too! Spry as a colt she's been ever since Christmas, or what I call Christmas, not having a calendar nor seen Sainty Claus, which I wouldn't expect, for have I been a good boy? Never! Never! Good boys go to heaven, and all my friends be in t'other place, toastin marshmallows and drinkin Nozzy spiked with whiskey in the devil's den! Arrr, ne'mine, my tongue's caught in the middle and runs on both ends! Hile to one, hile to t'other, and hile to the little furry gobbins in between! Billy-bumbler as I live and breathe! Yow, ain't it good to see ya! Joe Collins is my name, Joe Collins of Odd's Lane, plenty odd m'self, one-eyed and lame I am, but otherwise at your service!"

He had now reached the snowbank marking the spot where Tower Road ended... or where it began, depending on your point of view and the direction you were traveling, Susannah supposed. He looked up at them, one eye bright as a bird's, the other looking off into the white wastes with dull fascination.

"Long days and pleasant nights, yar, so say I, and anyone who'd say different, they ain't here anyway, so who gives a good goddam what they say?" From his pocket he took what could only be a gumdrop and tossed it up. Oy grabbed it out of the air easily: Snap!and gone.

At this both Roland and Susannah laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but it was a good feeling, like finding something of value long after you were sure it was lost forever. Even Oy appeared to be grinning, and if the horse bothered him (it trumpeted again as they looked down on sai Collins from their snowbank perch), it didn't show.

"I got a million questions for yer," Collins said, "but I'll start with just one: how in the hell are yers gonna get down offa that snowbank?"

FOUR

As it turned out, Susannah slid down, using their travois as a sled. She chose the place where die northwestern end of Odd's Lane disappeared beneath the snow, because die embankment was a litde shallower there. Her trip was short but not smooth.

She hit a large and crusted snow-boulder three quarters of the way down, fell off the travois, and made the rest of her descent in a pair of gaudy somersaults, laughing wildly as she fell. The travois turned over-turned turde, may it do ya-and spilled their gunna every whichway and hell to breakfast.

Roland and Oy came leaping down behind. Roland bent over her at once, clearly concerned, and Oy sniffed anxiously at her face, but Susannah was still laughing. So was the codger.

Daddy Mose would have called his laughter "gay as old Dad's hatband."

"I'm fine, Roland-took worse tumbles off my Flexible Flyer when I was a kid, tell ya true."

"All's well diat ends well," Joe Collins agreed. He gave her a look with his good eye to make sure she was indeed all right, then began to pick up some of the scattered goods, leaning laboriously over on his stick, his fine white hair blowing around his rosy face.

"Nah, nah," Roland said, reaching out to grasp his arm. "I'll do that, thee'll fall on thy thiddles."

At this the old man roared with laughter, and Roland joined him willingly enough. From behind the cottage, the horse gave another loud whinny, as if protesting all this good humor.

"'Fall on thy thiddles'! Man, that's a good one! I don't have the veriest clue under heaven what my diiddles are, yet it's a good one! Ain't it just!" He brushed the snow off Susannah's hide coat while Roland quickly picked up the spilled goods and stacked them back on dieir makeshift sled. Oy helped, bringing several wrapped packages of meat in his jaws and dropping them on the back of the travois.

"That's a smart little beastie!" Joe Collins said admiringly.

"He's been a good trailmate," Susannah agreed. She was now very glad they had stopped; would not have deprived herself of this good-natured old man's acquaintance for worlds.

She offered him her clumsily clad right hand. "I'm Susannah Dean-Susannah of New York. Daughter of Dan."

He took her hand and shook it. His own hand was ungloved, and although the fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his grip was strong. "New York, is it! Why, I once hailed from there, myself.

Also Akron, Omaha, and San Francisco. Son of Henry and Flora, if it matters to you."

"You're from America-side?" Susannah asked.

"Oh God yes, but long ago and long," he said. "What'chee might call delah." His good eye sparkled; his bad eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest.

He turned to Roland. "And who might you be, my friend? For I'll call you my friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I'd belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick."

Roland was grinning. Was helpless not to, Susannah thought. "Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of Steven."

"Gilead! Gilead!" Collins's good eye went round with amazement.

"There's a name out of the past, ain't it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you must be older'n God!"

"Some would say so," Roland agreed, now only smiling...

but warmly.

"And the little fella?" he asked, bending forward. From his pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of deja vu. It brushed her mind like a wing and then was gone. "What's your name, little fella? What do they holler when they want you to come home?"

"He doesn't-"

�Ctalk anymore, although he did once was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bum bier said: "Oy!" And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with Jake.

"Good fella!" Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into Oy's mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd's Lane and Tower Road.

"I'll be damned," Roland said mildly.

"So won't we all in the end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam,"

Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy's paw. "But not today.

Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it's warm and we can palaver over a cup of coffee-for I have some, so I do-or a pot of ale. I even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine, especially with a teensy piss o' rum in it, but who knows? I ain't really tasted nuf amp;nk in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia's done for my taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro', what do you say?" He regarded them brightly.

"I'd say that sounds pretty damned fine," Susannah told him. Rarely had she said anything she meant more.

He slapped her companionably on the shoulder. "A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don't know if that's Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t-

"Arrr, Lippy, goddam what used to be yer eyes, where do you think you're going? Did yer want to meet these folks, was that it?"

His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that seems the exclusive property of people who live alone except for a pet or two. His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the ugliest quadruped she'd seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind-not in one eye but in both-and scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recall: the slithering sound of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones.

Collins might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded almost defensive. "Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as she is, I don't reckon you'll be winnin many beauty contests yourself!" He patted the horse's chafed and sore-looking neck, then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.

"Come on, Lippy, y'old ki'-box and gammer-gurt, ye swayback nag and lost four-legged leper! Can't ye smell the snow in the air? Because I can, and my nose went south years ago!"

He turned back to Roland and Susannah and said, "I hope y'prove partial to my cookin, so I do, because I think this is gonna be a three-day blow. Aye, three at least before Demon Moon shows er face again! But we're well-met, so we are, and I set my watch and warrant on it! Ye just don't want to judge my hospitality by my horse-pita\ity\ Hee!"

I should hope not, Susannah thought, and gave a little shiver.

The old man had turned away, but Roland gave her a curious look. She smiled and shook her head as if to say It's nothing-which, of course, it was. She wasn't about to tell the gunslinger that a spavined nag with cataracts on her eyes and her ribs showing had given her a case of the whim-whams. Roland had never called her a silly goose, and by God she didn't mean to give him cause to do so n-

As if hearing her thoughts, the old nag looked back and bared her few remaining teeth at Susannah. The eyes in Lippy's bony wedge of a head were pus-rimmed plugs of blindness above her somehow gruesome grin. She whinnied at Susannah as if to say Think what you will, blackbird; I'll be here long after thee's gone thy course and died thy death. At the same time the wind gusted, swirling snow in their faces, soughing in the snow-laden firs, and hooting beneadi the eaves of Collins's little house. It began to die away and then strengthened again for a moment, making a brief, grieving cry that sounded almost human.

FIVE

The outbuilding consisted of a chicken-coop on one side,

Lippy's stall on the other, and a little loft stuffed with hay. "I can get up there and fork it down," Collins said, "but I take my life in my hands ever time I do, thanks to this bust hip of mine.

Now, I can't make you help an old man, sai Deschain, but if you would...?"

Roland climbed the ladder resting a-tilt against the edge of the loft floor and tossed down hay until Collins told him it was good, plenty enough to last Lippy through even four days" worth of blow. ("For she don't eat worth what'chee might call a Polish fuck, as you can see lookin at her," he said.) Then the gunslinger came back down and Collins led them along the short back walk to his cottage. The snow piled on either side was as high as Roland's head.

"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.

"Joe!" she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper. She felt faint, and it seemed she could hear singing voices, far and wee. "Oh, Joe! This picture...!"

"Aye, mum," he said, clearly pleased by her reaction. "It's a good 'un, ain't it? Which is why I pinned it up. I've got others, but this is the best. Right at sunset, so the shadow seems to lie forever back along the Path of the Beam. Which in a way it does, as I'm sure ye both must know."

Roland's breathing in her right ear was rapid and ragged, as if he'd just run a race, but Susannah barely noticed. For it was not just the subject of the picture that had filled her with awe.

"This is a Polaroid!"

"Well... yar," he said, sounding puzzled at the level of her excitement. "I suppose Stuttering Bill could have brung me a Kodak if I'd ast for one, but how would I ever have gotten the fillum developed? And by the time I thought of a video camera-for the gadget under the TV'd play such things-I was too old to go back, and yonder nag 'uz too old to carry me. Yet I would if I could, for it's lovely there, a place of warm-hearted ghosts. I heard the singing voices of friends long gone; my Ma and Pa, too. I allus-"

A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made Susannah dizzy. "You've been there?" he asked.

"You've been to the Dark Tower?"

"Indeed I have," said the old man. "For who else do ye think took that pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?"

"When did you take it?"

"That's from my last trip," he said. "Two year ago, in the summer-although that's lower land, ye must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I've never seen it."

"How long from here?"

Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn't take him long, but to Roland and Susannah it seemed long, very long indeed. Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest at the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist and dance.

"Well," he said, "ye're on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill keeps Tower Road plowed for as far as ye'd go; what else does the old whatchamacallit have to do with his time? O' course yell want to wait here until this new nor'east jeezer blows itself out-"

"How long once we're on the move?" Roland asked.

"Rarin t'go, ain'tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for if you've come from In-World ye must have been many long years gettin this far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I'm gonna say it'd take you six days to get out of the White Lands, maybe seven-"

"Do you call these lands Empathica?" Susannah asked.

He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. "Why no, ma'am-I've never heard this part of creation called anything but the White Lands."

The puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as Father Christmas in a children's play, had just lied to her. She wasn't sure why, and before she could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: "Would you let that go for now?

Would you, for your father's sake?"

"Yes, Roland," she said meekly. "Of course."

Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his hip.

"Might take you as long as nine days, I guess," Joe said, scratching his chin, "for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down the snow, but you can't get him to stop. He's got his orders to follow. His programmin, he calls it."

The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and raised his hand. "Nay, nay, I'm not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer-it's just that I'm not much used to cump'ny.

"Once you get down b'low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain't no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There's another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a' wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat'tries are all dead, natcherly-flat as yer hat-but there's a gennie there, too,

Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that'd cut your time down to four days at most. So here's what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one O'Them hummers-that's what I call em, hummers, for that's the sound they make when they're runnin-I should say ten days. Maybe eleven."

The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, no doubt.

"Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk," Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. "After all the years and all the miles."

Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. Bvit there was something offkey here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that.

Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?

And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?

"Tell me something, Joe Collins," Roland said.

"Aye, gunslinger, if I can."

"Have you been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?"

The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him.

When he was sure that wasn't the case, he looked shocked. "No,"

he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannah herself. "That pitcher's as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I'm gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away.

What the robot'd call five hundred arcs O'The wheel."

Roland nodded. "And why not?"

"Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn't be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today."

SEVEN

After dinner-surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life-the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins's fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd's Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.

He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas ("Only canned, say sorry," he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on "the teensy piss o' rum." Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by die stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.

"I couldn't eat dessert so don't ask me," Susannah said when she'd finished cleaning her plate for the second time, sopping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. "I'm not sure I can even get down from this chair."

"Well, that's all right," Joe said, looking disappointed, "maybe later. I've got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch one."

Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, "I could eat a dab of both, I think."

"Well, come to that, maybe I could, too," Susannah allowed.

How many eons since she'd tasted butterscotch?

When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he'd just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run "the whole happy bunch of em" later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o' rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.

He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred's out there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn't known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child.

"Tell us how you came to be here, Joe," Roland invited.

Joe grinned. "That's a hair-raising story," he said, "but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don't mind tellin it." The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. "It's nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back."

He'd started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn't for him. He liked the kids-loved them, in fact-but hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.

"Did you sing or dance?" Roland wanted to know.

"Neither one," Joe replied. "I gave em the old stand-up."

"Stand-up?"

"He means he was a comedian," Susannah said. "He told jokes."

"Correct!" Joe said brighdy. "Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority."

He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men's clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gigled to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on die weekends, even the thirdrate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.

This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there'd been no shortage of what Joe called "current events material": hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, moviestars, and, as always, politics-but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he'd stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met.

During his recitation, an odd (and-to Susannah, at least-rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins's Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to crossfade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American.

She kept expecting to hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard-AS hoid, but she guessed that was only because she'd spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as diey rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle.

Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. "You got it. Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks in their hands instead of the king and his courtiers."

Roland nodded, smiling.

"There are advantages to being a funnyman doing onenighters in the Midwest, though," he said. "If you tank in Dubuque, all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five and then it's on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World where they'd cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint."

At this the gunslinger burst out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although she was laughing herself). "You say true, Joe."

In the summer of 1972, Joe had been playing a nightclub called Jango's in Cleveland, not far from the ghetto. Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was.

"In the case of Hauck," Susannah said, "it means a part of the city where most of the people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their billyclubs first and asking questions later."

"Bing!"Joe exclaimed, and rapped his knuckles on the top of his head. "Couldn't have said it better myself!"

Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the house, but this time the wind was in a relative lull.

Susannah glanced at Roland, but if the gunslinger heard, he gave no sign.

It was the wind, Susannah told herself. What else could it be"?

Mordred, her mind whispered back. Mordred out there, freezing.

Mordred out there dying while we sit in here with our hot coffee.

But she said nothing.

There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he'd been drinking pretty heavily ("Hitting it hard" was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. "Hell, I was on a roll," he said. "I don't know about anyone else, but I was knocking myself dead, rolling me in the aisles."

Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club's front window (Molotov cocktail\nd amp; a term Roland understood)

, and before you could say Take my mother-in-law... please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the stage door. He'd almost made it to the street when three men

("all very black, all roughly the size of NBA centers") grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung a botde. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a deserted town called Stone's Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors had gone home.

It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins's story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake's first entry into Mid-World, after being run over in die street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally implausible. But she still didn't believe much of it.

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.

"I'd hear some of your jokes and stories," Roland said. "As you told them on the road, if it does ya."

Susannah looked at him closely, wondering if the gunslinger had some ulterior motive for this request, but he seemed genuinely interested. Even before seeing the Polaroid of the Dark Tower tacked to the living room wall (his eyes returned to it constandy as Joe told his story), Roland had been invested by a kind of hectic good cheer that was really not much like him at all. It was almost as if he were ill, edging in and out of delirium.

Joe Collins seemed surprised by the gunslinger's request, but not at all displeased. "Good God," he said. "I haven't done any stand-up in what seems like a thousand years... and considering the way time stretched there for awhile, maybe it has been a thousand. I'm not sure I'd know how to begin."

Susannah surprised herself by saying, "Try."

EIGHT

Joe thought about it and then stood up, brushing a few errant crumbs from his shirt. He limped to the center of the room, leaving his crutch leaning against his chair. Oy looked up at him with his ears cocked and his old grin on his chops, as if anticipating the entertainment to come. For a moment Joe looked uncertain. Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and gave them a smile. "Promise you won't throw no tomatoes if I stink up the joint," he said. "Remember, it's been a long time."

"Not after you took us in and fed us," Susannah said. "Never in life."

Roland, always literal, said, "We have no tomatoes, in any case."

"Right, right. Although there are some canned ones in the pantry... forget I said that!"

Susannah smiled. So did Roland.

Encouraged, Joe said: "Okay, let's go back to that magical place called Jango's in that magical city some folks call the mistake on the lake. Cleveland, Ohio, in other words. Second show. The one I never got to finish, and I was on a roll, take my word for it. Give me just a second..."

He closed his eyes. Seemed to gather himself. When he opened them again, he somehow looked ten years younger. It was astounding. And he didn't just sound American when he began to speak, he looked American. Susannah couldn't have explained that in words, but she knew it was true: here was one Joe Collins, Made in U.S.A.

"Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Jango's, I'm Joe Collins and you're not."

Roland chuckled and Susannah smiled, mostly to be polite-that was a pretty old one.

"The management has asked me to remind you that this is two-beers-for-a-buck night. Got it? Good. With them the motive is profit, with me it's self-interest. Because the more you drink, the funnier I get."

Susannah's smile widened. There was a rhythm to comedy, even sheknew that, although she couldn't have done even five minutes of stand-up in front of a noisy nightclub crowd, not if her life had depended on it. There was a rhythm, and after an uncertain beginning, Joe was finding his. His eyes were halflidded, and she guessed he was seeing the mixed colors of the gels over the stage-so like the colors of the Wizard's Rainbow, now that she thought of it-and smelling the smoke of fifty smoldering cigarettes. One hand on the chrome pole of the mike; the other free to make any gesture it liked. Joe Collins playing Jango's on a Friday night-

No, not a Friday. He said all the clubs book rock-and-roll bands on the weekends.

"Ne'mine all that mistake-on-the-lake stuff, Cleveland's a beautiful city," Joe said. He was picking up the pace a little now.

Starting to rap, Eddie might have said. "My folks are from Cleveland, but when they were seventy they moved to Florida.

They didn't want to, but shitfire, it's the law. Bing!"Joe rapped his knuckles against his head and crossed his eyes. Roland chuckled again even though he couldn't have the slightest idea where (or even what) Florida was. Susannah's smile was wider than ever.

"Florida's a helluva place," Joe said. "Helluva place. Home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. My grandfather retired to Florida, God rest his soul. When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like Grampa Fred. Not screaming, like the passengers in his car."

Roland roared with laughter at that one, and Susannah did, too. Oy's grin was wider than ever.

"My grandma, she was great, too. She said she learned how to swim when someone took her out on the Cuyahoga River and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Hey, Nana, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'"

Roland snorted, wiped his nose, then snorted again. His cheeks had bloomed with color. Laughter elevated the entire metabolism, put it almost on a fight-or-flight basis; Susannah had read that somewhere. Which meant her own must be rising, because she was laughing, too. It was as if all the horror and sorrow were gushing out of an open wound, gushing out like-

Well, like blood.

She heard a faint alarm-bell start to ring, far back in her mind, and ignored it. What was there to be alarmed about?

They were laughing, for goodness' sake! Having a good time!

"Can I be serious a minute? No? Well, fuck you and the nag you rode in on-tomorrow when I wake up, I'll be sober, but you'll still be ugly.

"And bald."

(Roland roared.)

"I'm gonna be serious, okay? If you don't like it, stick it where you keep your change-purse. My Nana was a great lady.

Women in general are great, you know it? But they have their flaws, just like men. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving a baby's life, for instance, she'll save the baby without even considering how many men are on base. Bing!" He rapped his head with his knuckles and popped his eyes in a way that made them both laugh. Roland tried to put his coffee cup down and spilled it. He was holding his stomach. Hearing him laugh so hard-to surrender to laughter so completely-was funny in itself, and Susannah burst out in a fresh gale.

"Men are one thing, women are another. Put em together and you've got a whole new taste treat. Like Oreos. Like Peanut Butter Cups. Like raisin cake with snot sauce. Show me a man and a woman and I'll show you the Peculiar Institution-not slavery, marriage. But I repeat myself. Bing!" He rapped his head. Popped his eyes. This time they seemed to come kasproing halfway out of their sockets

(how does he do that)

and Susannah had to clutch her stomach, which was beginning to ache with the force of her laughter. And her temples were beginning to pound. It hurt, but it was a good hurt.

"Marriage is having a wife or a husband. Yeah! Check Webster's!

Bigamy is having a wife or husband too many. Of course, that's also monogamy. Bing!"

If Roland laughed any harder, Susannah thought, he would go sliding right out of his chair and into the puddle of spilled coffee.

"Then there's divorce, a Latin term meaning 'to rip a man's genitals out through the wallet."

"But I was talking about Cleveland, remember? You know how Cleveland got started? A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee I'm starting to enjoy the crime and die poverty, but it's not quite cold enough. Let's go west.'"

Laughter, Susannah would reflect later, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, selfsupporting.

You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny. Joe Collins took them to this point with his next sally.

"Hey, remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quiedy with the smallest people in front and the tallest people at die end of the line? What's the logic in that? Do tall people burn slower?"

Susannah shrieked wiui laughter and slapped die side of her face. This produced a sudden and unexpected burst of pain that drove all the laughter out of her in a moment. The sore beside her mouth had been growing again, but hadn't bled in two or three days. When she inadvertently struck it wiui her flailing hand, she knocked away the blackish-red crust covering it.

The sore did not just bleed; it gushed.

For a moment she was unaware of what had just happened.

She only knew that slapping the side of her face hurt much more than it should have done. Joe also seemed unaware (his eyes were mosdy closed again), must have been unaware, because he rapped faster than ever: "Hey, and what about that seafood restaurant they have at Sea World? I got halfway through my fishburger and wondered if I was eating a slow learner! Bing!

And speaking offish-"

Oy barked in alarm. Susannah felt sudden wet warmth run down the side of her neck and onto her shoulder.

"Stop, Joe," Roland said. He sounded out of breath. Weak.

With laughter, Susannah supposed. Oh, but the side of her face hurt, and-

Joe opened his eyes, looking annoyed. "What? Jesus Christ, you wanted it and I was givingit to ya!"

"Susannah's hurt herself." The gunslinger was up and looking at her, laughter lost in concern.

"I'm not hurt, Roland, I just slapped myself upside the head a litde harder than I m-" Then she looked at her hand and was dismayed to see it was wearing a red glove.

NINE

Oy barked again. Roland snatched the napkin from beside his overturned cup. One end was brown and soaking with coffee, but the other was dry. He pressed it against the gushing sore and Susannah winced away from his touch at first, her eyes filling with tears.

"Nay, let me stop the bleeding at least," Roland murmured, and grasped her head, working his fingers gently into the tight cap of her curls. "Hold steady." And for him she managed to do it.

Through her watering eyes Susannah thought Joe still looked pissed that she had interrupted his comedy routine in such drastic (not to mention messy) fashion, and in a way she didn't blame him. He'd been doing a really good job; she'd gone and spoiled it. Aside from the pain, which was abating a little now, she was horribly embarrassed, remembering the time she had started her period in gym class and a little trickle of blood had run down her thigh for the whole world to see-that part of it with whom she had third-period PE, at any rate. Some of the girls had begun chanting Plug it UP!, as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

Mixed with this memory was fear concerning the sore itself.

What if it was cancer? Before, she'd always been able to thrust this idea away before it was fully articulated in her mind. This time she couldn't. What if she'd caught her stupid self a cancer on her trek through the Badlands?

Her stomach knotted, then heaved. She kept her fine dinner in its place, but perhaps only for the time being.

Suddenly she wanted to be alone, needed to be alone. If she was going to vomit, she didn't want to do it in front of Roland and this stranger. Even if she wasn't, she wanted some time to get herself back under control. A gust of wind strong enough to shake the entire cottage roared past like a hot-enj in full flight; the lights flickered and her stomach knotted again at the seasick motion of the shadows on the wall.

"I've got to go... the bathroom..." she managed to say.

For a moment the world wavered, but then it steadied down again. In the fireplace a knot of wood exploded, shooting a flurry of crimson sparks up the chimney.

"You sure?" Joe asked. He was no longer angry (if he had been), but he was looking at her doubtfully.

"Let her go," Roland said. "She needs to settle herself down,

I think."

Susannah began to give him a grateful smile, but it hurt the sore place and started it bleeding again, too. She didn't know what else might change in the immediate future thanks to the dumb, unhealing sore, but she did know she was done listening to jokes for awhile. She'd need a transfusion if she did much more laughing.

"I'll be back," she said. "Don't you boys go and eat all the rest of that pudding on me." The very thought of food made her feel ill, but it was something to say.

"On the subject of pudding, I make no promise," Roland said. Then, as she began to turn away: "If thee feels lightheaded in there, call me."

"I will," she said. "Thank you, Roland."

TEN

Although Joe Collins lived alone, his bathroom had a pleasantly feminine feel to it. Susannah had noticed that the first time she'd used it. The wallpaper was pink, with green leaves and-what else?-wild roses. The John looked perfectly modern except for the ring, which was wood instead of plastic. Had he carved it himself? She didn't think it was out of the question, although probably the robot had brought it from some forgotten store of stuff. Stuttering Carl? Was that what Joe called the robot? No, Bill. Stuttering Bill.

On one side of the John there was a stool, on the other a claw-foot tub with a shower attachment that made her think of Hitchcock's Psycho (but every shower made her think of that damned movie since she'd seen it in Times Square). There was also a porcelain washstand set in a waist-high wooden cabinet-good old plainoak rather than ironwood, she judged.

There was a mirror above it. She presumed you swung it out and there were your pills and potions. All the comforts of home.

She removed the napkin with a wince and a litde hissing cry.

It had stuck in the drying blood, and pulling it away hurt. She was dismayed by the amount of blood on her cheeks, lips, and chin-not to mention her neck and the shoulder of her shirt.

She told herself not to let it make her crazy; you ripped the top off something and it was going to bleed, that was all. Especially if it was on your stupid face.

In the other room she heard Joe say something, she couldn't tell what, and Roland's response: a few words with a chuckle tacked on at the end. So weird to hear him do that, she thought. Almost like he's drunk. Had she ever seen Roland drunk? She realized she had not. Never falling-down drunk, never mother-naked, never fully caught by laughter... until now.

Ten'yo business, woman, Detta told her.

"All right," she muttered. "All right, all right."

Thinking drunk. Thinking naked. Thinking lost in laughter.

Thinking they were all so close to being the same thing.

Maybe they were the same thing.

Then she got up on the stool and turned on the water. It came in a gush, blotting out the sounds from the other room.

She setded for cold, splashing it gendy on her face, then using a facecloth-even more gendy-to clean die skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didn't hurt as much as she'd been afraid it might. Susannah was a litde encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joe's facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure: if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaning-out while it was open. And ne'mine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, she'd bandage it over and then just hope for the best.

She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flower-decked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, bold-face line:

RELAX! /te?e OOM amp;S, rue-

And, in faded fountain pen ink Odd's Odd O\ amp;?

Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written: s T'vc left fo* Sonc/liig 1*1 ife JnediciJte but- -fit'/

In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand that-he'd been doing something he loved, something he hadn't had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years-but part of her didn't like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boysclubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.

Why don't you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what's right in front of you? What does it mean?

One thing seemed obvious: someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her.

What a bad girl, it said. Girl.

But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasn't as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn't remember a single other instance when-

But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin^Jerry Lewis movie.

Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She'd been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become selffeeding.

The whole audience-at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew-doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once.

Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there's no tragedy here, is there?

She didn't expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.

Not yet, there isn't.

For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell?

Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his

(take my horse... please)

routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.

What in the hell's wrong with you, woman?

In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter.

Odd's Lane, Odd Lane... think about it.

What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same thing, only without the-

"Whoa-back, wait a minute," she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talking-pretty much nonstop, it sounded like-and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening?

The cellar-dweller, if there really was one?

"Whoa-on a minute, just wait."

She closed her eyes and once more saw the two street-signs on their pole, signs that were actually a little below die pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a snowbank nine feet high. TOWER ROAD, one of the signs had read-that one pointing to the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The other, the one indicating the short lane with the cottages on it, had said ODD's LANE, only...

"Only it didn't," she murmured, clenching the hand that wasn't holding the note into a fist. "It didn't"

She could see it clearly enough in her mind's eye: ODDS LANE, with the apostrophe and the S added, and why would somebody do that? Was the sign-changer maybe a compulsive neatnik who couldn't stand-

What? Couldn't stand what?

Beyond the closed bathroom door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over and broke. He's not used to laughing like that, Susannah thought. You best look out, Roland, or you 'll do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something.

Think about it, her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there something about the words odd and lane that someone didn't want them to see? If so, that person had no need to worry, because she sure wasn't seeing it.

She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff: jokes and riddles and... an...

Her breath stopped. An expression of wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn her face, and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental rearrangements that she now had to-

Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waisthigh washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed

0W? IANE-Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay.

In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn't merry. It was jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way folken laughed in hell.

Below 0W? ?AA/? she used the tip of her finger to print t)N?lt)?LO, the anagram Eddie might have seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostrophe-S on the sign had been added to distract them.

In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland-

Roland was choking.