The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower #7)

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower #7) Page 29

ONE

She wasn't wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-ZBoy recliner when they'd returned to the living room after dinner, and she'd put the revolver on the magazine-littered endtable beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells.

The shells were in her pocket.

Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing.

Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair-that baby-fine, shoulder-length white hair-was now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead often years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger.

The son of a bitch.

The vampire son of a bitch.

Oy leaped at him and seized Joe's left leg just above the knee. "Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen, hiker Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOfJSJseS amp;OaRtiOMe to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.

"What I think," he said, "is that women need a reason to have sex." Joe put one foot on Roland's chest-like a big-game hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. "Men, on the other hand, only need a place\ Bing!" He popped his eyes. "The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a-"

He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-ZBoy in order to gain the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joe's head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating.

Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth-perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn't the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing: darkening, contracting, turning into somediing that was no longer human. It was die face of a psychotic clown.

"You," he said, but before he could say anydiing else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the thing's ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abrupdy when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily.

Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out.

Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo's shadow fell over them.

"You bitch, I'll teach you to interrupt a man when he's on a-"

"Roland, let it go!" she screamed, and he did.

Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasn't his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface things-not features at all but markings on some animal's hide or an insect's carapace.

"Stop!" he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicada's buzz. "I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!"

"Heard it," she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye.

TWO

Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn't want to know, as long as it didn't make her sick. As long as it wasn't poisonous.

Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo's glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostat-a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartnient-was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and rilled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.

The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages-almost arms and legs-sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse dian Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.

The tidy, well-lit cottage-like something out of a fairytale, and hadn't she seen that from the first?-was now a dim and smoky peasant's hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.

"Roland, are you all right?"

Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still.

"Gunslinger, I was 'mazed," Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. "I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon."

"Roland, no! Git up!" That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought,

It's a wonder I didn't say "Git up, honky, "and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.

"Give me pardon, first," Roland said, not looking at her.

She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn't stand to see him on his knees like diat. "Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart." She paused, then added: "If I save your life another nine times, we'll be somewhere close to even."

He said, 'Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,"

and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close litde hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.

"What he fed us was all right," he said. It was as if he'd read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. "He'd never poison what he meant to... eat."

She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut's door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the litde entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a litde less like a sauna.

"How did you know?" he asked.

She thought back to die hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen.

Later on, after they'd left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and

(dad-a-chee)

a key. Jake's name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she'd found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both.

According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza-Park Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King.

"Come with me," she said. "Into the bathroom."

THREE

Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used...

Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used. The shower-head was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that she hadn't cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime: 0W? lAt/B, and, below that, amp;Wfc??O.

"It's an anagram," she said. "Do you see?"

He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed.

"Not your fault, Roland. They're our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it, it's an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don't know if it was Dandelo's idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King."

"You figured it out," he said. "I was busy laughing myself to death."

"We both would have done that," she said. 'You were just a litde more vulnerable because your sense of humor... forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, it's pretty lame."

"I know tfiat," he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room.

A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. "Roland, is he still...?"

He nodded, smiling a litde. "Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure."

"I'm glad," she said simply.

"Oy's standing guard. If anything were to happen, I'm sure he'd let us know." He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine cabinet. "'I've left you something.' Do you know what?"

She shook her head. "I didn't have time to look."

"Where is this medicine cabinet?"

She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to Susannah like the world's oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops.

There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:

$ amp;e?(

"Childe?" she asked. "Does that mean anything to you?"

He nodded. "It's a term that describes a knight-or a gunslinger-on a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven't thought of myself so in many years."

"Yet you are Childe Roland?"

"Perhaps once I was. We're beyond such things now.

Beyond ka."

"But still on the Path of the Beam."

"Aye." He traced the last line on the envelope: All debts are paid. "Open it, Susannah, for I'd see what's inside."

She did.

FOUR

It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet's name in his half-script, half-printing above the title. Susannah had read some of Browning's dramatic monologues in college, but she wasn't familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic (a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. Someone-King, presumably-had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI.

"Read the marked ones," he said hoarsely, "because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well."

"Stanza the First," she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture.

"My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby."

"Collins," Roland said. "Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our ka-tet in his stories!

"He lied in every word!' Aye, so he did!"

"Not Collins," she said. "Dandelo."

Roland nodded. "Dandelo, say true. Go on."

"Okay; Stanza the Second.

"What else should he be set for, with his staff?

What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare all travellers who might find him posted there, and ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare."

"Does thee remember his stick, and how he waved it?"

Roland asked her.

Of course she did. And the thoroughfare had been snowy instead of dusty, but otherwise it was the same. Otherwise it was a description of what had just happened to them. The idea made her shiver.

"Was this poet of your time?" Roland asked. 'Your when?"

She shook her head. "Not even of my country. He died at least sixty years before my when."

"Yet he must have seen what just passed. A version of it, anyway."

"Yes. And Stephen King knew the poem." She had a sudden intuition, one that blazed too bright to be anything but the truth. She looked at Roland with wild, startled eyes. "It was this poem that got King going! It was his inspiration!"

"Do you say so, Susannah?" v,

"Yes!"

"Yet this Browning must have seen us."

She didn't know. It was too confusing. Like trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or being lost in a hall of mirrors. Her head was swimming.

"Read the next one marked, Susannah! Read ex-eye-eyeeye."

"That's Stanza Thirteen," she said.

"As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair

In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud

Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.

One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,

Stood stupefied, however he came there;

Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

"Now Stanza the Fourteenth I read thee.

"Alive? He might be dead for aught I know,

With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,

And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

I never saw a brute I hated so;

He must be wicked to deserve such pain."

"Lippy," the gunslinger said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "Yonder's pluggit, colloped neck and all, only female instead of male."

She made no reply-needed to make none. Of course it was Lippy: blind and bony, her neck rubbed right down to the raw pink in places. Her an ugly old thing, I know, the old man had said... the thing that had looked like an old man. Ye old ki'-box and gammer-gurt, ye lost four-legged leper! And here it was in black and white, a poem written long before sai King was even born, perhaps eighty or even a hundred years before:... as scant as hair/In leprosy.

"Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!" Roland said, smiling grimly. "And while she'll never stud nor ever did, we'll see she's back with the devil before we leave!"

"No," she said. "We won't." Her voice sounded drier than ever. She wanted a drink, but was now afraid to take anything flowing from the taps in this vile place. In a little bit she would get some snow and melt it. Then she would have her drink, and not before.

"Why do you say so?"

"Because she's gone. She went out into the storm when we got the best of her master."

"How does thee know it?"

Susannah shook her head. "I just do." She shuffled to the next page in the poem, which ran to over two hundred lines.

"Stanza the Sixteenth.

"Not it! I fancied.

She ceased.

"Susannah? Why do you-" Then his eyes fixed on the next word, which he could read even in English letters. "Go on," he said. His voice was low, the words little more than a whisper.

"Are you positive?"

"Read, for I would hear."

She cleared her throat.

"Stanza the Sixteenth.

"Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face

Beneath its garniture of curly gold,

Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold

An arm in mine to fix me to the place,

That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!

Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold."

"He writes of Mejis," Roland said. His fists were clenched, although she doubted that he knew it. "He writes of how we fell out over Susan Delgado, for after that it was never the same between us. We mended our friendship as best we could, but no, it was never quite the same."

"After the woman comes to the man or the man to the woman, I don't think it ever is," she said, and handed him the photocopied sheets. "Take this. I've read all the ones he mentioned.

If there's stuff in the rest about coming to the Dark Tower-or not-puzzle it out by yourself. You can do it if you try hard enough, I reckon. As for me, I don't want to know."

Roland, it seemed, did. He shuffled through the pages, looking for the last one. The pages weren't numbered, but he found the end easily enough by the white space beneath that stanza marked XXXIV. Before he could read, however, that thin cry came again. This time the wind was in a complete lull and there was no doubt about where it came from.

"That's someone below us, in the basement," Roland said.

"I know. And I think I know who it is."

He nodded.

She was looking at him steadily. "It all fits, doesn't it? It's like ajigsaw puzzle, and we've put in all but the last few pieces."

The cry came again, thin and lost. The cry of someone who was next door to dead. They left the bathroom, drawing their guns. Susannah didn't think they'd need them this time.

FIVE

The bug that had made itself look like a jolly old joker named Joe Collins lay where it had lain, but Oy had backed off a step or two. Susannah didn't blame him. Dandelo was beginning to stink, and little trickles of white stuff were beginning to ooze through its decaying carapace. Nevertheless, Roland bade the bumbler remain where he was, and keep watch.

The cry came again when they reached the kitchen, and it was louder, but at first they saw no way down to the cellar.

Susannah moved slowly across the cracked and dirty linoleum, looking for a hidden trapdoor. She was about to tell Roland there was nothing when he said, "Here. Behind the cold-box."

The refrigerator was no longer a top-of-the-line Amana with an icemaker in the door but a squat and dirty thing with the cooling machinery on top, in a drum-shaped casing. Her mother had had one like it when Susannah had been a little girl who answered to the name of Odetta, but her mother would have died before ever allowing her own to be even a tenth as dirty. A hundredth.

Roland moved it aside easily, for Dandelo, sly monster that he'd been, had put it on a little wheeled platform. She doubted that he got many visitors, not way out here in End-World, but he had been prepared to keep his secrets if someone did drop by.

As she was sure folken did, every once and again. She imagined that few if any got any further along their way than the little hut on Odd Lane.

The stairs leading down were narrow and steep. Roland felt around inside the door and found a switch. It lit two bare bulbs, one halfway down the stairs and one below. As if in response to the light, the cry came again. It was full of pain and fear, but there were no words in it. The sound made her shiver.

"Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are!" Roland called.

No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and whooped, driving snow against the side of the house so hard that it sounded like sand.

"Come to where we can see you, or we'll leave you where you are!" Roland called.

The inhabitant of the cellar didn't come into the scant light but cried ovit again, a sound that was loaded with woe and terror and-Susannah feared it-madness.

He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. "Go first. I'll back your play, if you have to make one."

"'Ware the steps that you don't take a tumble," he said in the same low voice.

She nodded again and made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand: Go on, go on.

That raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslinger's lips. He went down the stairs with the barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for a moment he looked so like Jake Chambers that she could have wept.

SIX

The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks. Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind.

Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zigzag aisle with crates stacked head-high on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled TEXAS INSTRUMENTS and another stack with HO

FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE co. stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their long-abandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise.

Ahead of her, Roland stopped. "Tears of my mother," he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal's living eyes out of their sockets.

She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.

In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo's cellar-the southeast corner, if she had her directions right-there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct i t... but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on die acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner's reach-left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt-was a large and old-fashioned

(dad-a-chum dad-a-chee)

silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-

camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy's pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do.

Something like that was in Patrick Danville's eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises.

Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!

Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door.

One of Danville's hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long-it hung all the way to his shoulders-but there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.

"No offense, Patrick," Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. "Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?"

The scrawny thing in the dirtyjeans and billowing gray shirt

(it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder: I-YEEE! I-YOWK! IYEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful head-banging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, long-fingered hands again, as if for succor.

Roland looked to Susannah.

She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing in the corner uttered its weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense.

"No, honey." This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected. "No, honey, Ah ain' goan hurt you, if Ah meant t'do dat, Ah'd just put two in yo' haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs."

She saw something in his eyes-perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. "Dass ri'! Mistuh Collins, he daid. He ain' nev' goan come down he' no mo an... whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick?"

Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest.

"Whuh he do t'you, boy?"

It was no good. He didn't understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter.

"He make you laugh?"

Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose.

"He make you cry, too."

Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going ho-ho-ho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and making smack-smack sounds with his lips.

From above and slightly behind her, Roland said: "He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made you eat."

Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner.

"He ate," Detta said. "Dass whut you trine t'say, ain't it?

Dandeloate."

Patrick nodded eagerly.

"He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do!"

Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if the head-banging started again. It didn't. When she reached die boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept.

Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes i that he could come in now.

When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration.

"Don't you worry," Susannah said-Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. "He's not going to get you,

Patrick, he's dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth."

Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she hated to see even more. It was shame.

"Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth."

He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head of a mop.

Roland said, "What-"

"Hush," she told him. "Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we'll take you out of here and you'll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo's dinner again."

Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoner's voice-or the words it articulated, anyway-and had pulled it out.

SEVEN

Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boy's gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the hut's only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins's heavy parka hung on the hook in the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of Dandelo-Joe Collins that was-they had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow.

She said, "Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there... Patrick was his cow. There's two ways you can take nourishment from a cow: meat or milk.

The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts, and then the stew, it's gone. If youjust take the milk, though, you can go on forever... always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then."

"How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?" Roland asked.

"I don't know." But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. "A fairly long time, anyway.

What must have seemed like forever to him."

"And it hurt."

"Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid's tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is."

Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. "We can't take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I'm sure it would kill him."

Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the house. That might kill her.

Roland agreed when she said so. "We'll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It'll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back."

"You'd kill them both?"

"Aye, if I could. Do'ee have a problem with that?"

She considered it, then shook her head.

"All right. Let's put together what we'd take out there, for we'll have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four."

EIGHT

It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.

During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more bout Patrick Danville than she had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayre's office.

Dandelo had given his captive the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and had stolen emotions from him on a regular basis: two times a week, sometimes three, once in awhile even four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him, someone would happen by. Just lately,

Patrick had been spared the worst of Dandelo's depredations, because "company" had been more frequent than ever before.

Roland told her later that night, after they'd bedded down in the hayloft, that he believed many of Dandelo's most recent victims must have been exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi Russe or the town around it. Susannah could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such refugees: The King is gone, so let's get the hell out of here while the getting's good. After all, Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and he's off his chump, round the bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor.

On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then had eaten the boy's resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors: like having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that.

Patrick couldn't talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find he'd come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a canningjar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencil-sharpener diat looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis.

When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.

Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, "Let's see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don't you?"

It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville's drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor's head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters.

Above Collins's head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of die Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, widi one hand twined in Patrick's hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patrick's laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left die paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man's head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.

"What does it say?" Roland asked, fascinated.

"'YUM! Good!'" Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.

Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made them-well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?-little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren't sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick-this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam-would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt?

It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.

Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah's mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her-or to Roland-that this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.

NINE

Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended die ladder.

Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.

"I think it's likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing," he said. "He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?"

She remembered very well, and said so.

"It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo," Roland said. "I don't think that's likely, but it wouldn't be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I'll be ready with my gun."

"But you don't think so." She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.

"No," Roland said. "He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy's still weak."

This raised a question in her mind. "We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy," she said. "How old do you think he is?"

Roland shook his head. "Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest to that."

"Did Stephen King put him in our way?"

"I can't say, only that he knew of him, sure." He paused.

"The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?"

She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo's hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still held. She knew what the voices sang-commala! commala!

commala-come-come!-but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland's song, and Roland's alone. But she had begun to hope that that didn't necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her quest.

She had been having her own dreams.

TEN

Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle-combination truck and bulldozer-appeared over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow's operator)

would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab's roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth.

Susannah laughed, delighted. "'California Sun'! The Rivieras!

Oh, doesn't it sound finel"

"If you say so," Roland agreed. "Just keep hold of thy plate."

"You can count on that," she said.

Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL. This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his head reading YARW YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn't think it was what he wanted her to look at.

The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life.

ELEVEN

The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo's hut, and although the engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the driver's seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least),

shiny-headed robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis.

He cocked his metal arms and put his metal hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucas's C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the snowfields:

"HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW? HOW ABE TRICKS INKUH-KUH-KOKOMO?"

Roland stepped out of the late Lippy's quarters. "Hile, Bill,"

he said mildly. "Long days and pleasant nights."

The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn't appear to be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head-twirling and twirling in the bright morning light-and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasyjapaneezy, Eddie would have said.

"Ah!" said the robot. "A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g-" He raised an arm that had not one elbow-joint but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a litde whisding noise-Wheeep!-and then he finished: "A gunslinger!"

Susannah laughed. She couldn't help it. They had come all this way to meet an oversized electronic version of Porky Pig.

T'beya-t'beya-t'beya, that's all, folks!

"I had heard rumors of such on the 1-1-1-land," the robot said, ignoring her laughter. "Are you Ruh-Ruh-Roland of GGilead?"

"So I am," Roland said. "And you?"

"William, D-746541-M, Maintenance Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me Stuh-huttering B-Bill. I've got a f-f-fried sir-hirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuh-fuhforbade me. And since he's the only h-human around... or was..." He stopped. Susannah could quite clearly hear die clitter-

clack of relays somewhere inside and what she thought of wasn't C3P0, who she'd of course never seen, but Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.

Then Stuttering Bill quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and bowing... but not to either her or to Roland. He said, "Hile, Patrick D-Danville, son of S-SSonia!

It's good to see you out and in the c-c-clear, so it is!" And Susannah could hear the emotion in Stuttering Bill's voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay about lowering her plate.

TWELVE

They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been quite willing to go into the hut, for he had but rudimentary olfactory equipment.

The humes were better equipped and knew that the hut stank and had not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were both out. In any case, the palaver didn't take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe Collins as his master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the job. Besides, Collins/Dandelo had the necessary code-words.

"I w-was nuh-not able to g-give him the c-code wuh-wuhhurds when he a-asked," said Stuttering Bill, "but my p-programming did not pruh-prohibit bringing him cer-hertain m-manuals that had the ih-information he needed."

"Bureaucracy is so wonderful," Susannah said.

Bill said he had stayed away from "JJ-Joe" as often (and as long) as he could, although he had to come when Tower Road needed plowing-that was also in his programming-and once a month to bring provisions (canned goods, mostly) from what he called "the Federal." He also liked to see Patrick, who had once given Bill a wonderful picture of himself that he looked at often (and of which he had made many copies). Yet every time he came, he confided, he was sure he would find Patrick gone-killed and thrown casually into the woods somewhere back toward what Bill called "the Buh-Buh-Bads," like an old piece of trash. But now here he was, alive and free, and Bill was delighted.

"For I do have r-r-rudimentary em-m-motions," he said, sounding to Susannah like someone owning up to a bad habit.

"Do you need the code-words from us, in order to accept our orders?" Roland asked.

"Yes, sai," Stuttering Bill said.

"Shit," Susannah muttered. They had had similar problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis.

"H-H-However," said Stuttering Bill, "if you were to c-ccouch your orders as suh-huh-hugestions, I'm sure I'd be huhhuh-

huh-huh-" He raised his arm and smacked his head again. The Wheep! sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region of his chest, Susannah thought. "-happy to oblige," he finished.

"My first suggestion is that you fix that fucking stutter,"

Roland said, and then turned around, amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing great, blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was harmless; this time there was no one to steal Patrick's joy. It belonged only to him. And to those lucky enough to hear it.

THIRTEEN

In the woods beyond the plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called "the Bads," a shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, half-scraped hides watched the quartet standing in front of Dandelo's hut. Die, he thought at them.

Die, why don'tyou all do me a favor and just die? But they didn't die, and the cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives.

Later, after they had all piled into the cab of Bill's plow and driven away, Mordred crept down to the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the cans in Dandelo's pantry-and eating something else as well, something he would live to regret. He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big storm had come close to killing him. He believed it was his hate that had kept him alive, that and no more.

Or perhaps it was the Tower.

For he felt it, too-that pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick heard in a major key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he heard only one. It was the voice of his Red Father, telling him to come. Telling him to kill the mute boy, and the blackbird bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the uncaring White Daddy who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left him behind, but this never crossed Mordred's mind.)

And when the killing was done, the whispering voice promised, they would destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity.

So Mordred ate, for Mordred was a-hungry. And Mordred slept, for Mordred was a-weary. And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelo's warm clothes and set out along the freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich sack of gunna on a sled behind him-canned goods, mostly-he had become a young man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old, tall and straight and as fair as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar on his side where Susannah's bullet had winged him, and the blood-mark on his heel. That heel, he had promised himself, would rest on Roland's throat, and soon.