The Dark Tower

CHAPTER I:
THE SORE AND THE DOOR (GOODBYE, MY DEAR)

ONE

In the final days of their long journey, after Bill—just Bill now, no longer Stuttering Bill—dropped them off at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean began to suffer frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and do her necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the cold ground, put her hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland knew this was happening—and surely he must have noted her red eyes when she returned to the road—he made no comment. She supposed he knew what she did.

Her time in Mid-World—and End-World—was almost at an end.

TWO

Bill took them in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front reading

FEDERAL OUTPOST 19

TOWER WATCH

TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT

IS FORBIDDEN!

She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the ground was little more than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah thought the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weather—perhaps even pokeberries—but now they were bare and clattering in the nearly constant wind. Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Road—which had once been paved but had now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken ruts—were tall grasses poking out of the thin snow-cover. They whispered in the wind and Susannah knew their song: Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.

“I may go no further,” Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off Little Richard in mid-rave. “Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o’ the Borderlands.”

Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and during that time he had entertained them with a constant stream of what he called “golden oldies.” Some of these were not old at all to Susannah; songs like “Sugar Shack” and “Heat Wave” had been current hits on the radio when she’d returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful silver discs Bill called “ceedees.” He pushed them into a slot in the plow’s instrument-cluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight different speakers. Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed, but she was especially taken by two songs she had never heard before. One was a deliriously happy little rocker called “She Loves You.” The other, sad and reflective, was called “Hey Jude.” Roland actually seemed to know the latter one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different from the ones coming out of the plow’s multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her the group was called The Beetles.

“Funny name for a rock-and-roll band,” Susannah said.

Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plow’s tiny rear seat, tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was currently working his way. Beneath a picture of Roland in profile, he had printed: BEATLES, not Beetles.

“It’s a funny name for a rock-and-roll band no matter which way you spell it,” Susannah said, and that gave her an idea. “Patrick, do you have the touch?” When he frowned and raised his hands—I don’t understand, the gesture said—she rephrased the question. “Can you read my mind?”

He shrugged and smiled. This gesture said I don’t know, but she thought Patrick did know. She thought he knew very well.

THREE

They reached “the Federal” near noon, and there Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick wolfed his and then sat off to one side with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as they sat around the table in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room were covered with TV screens—Susannah guessed there were three hundred or more. They must have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed the rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and one showed a series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach if she looked at it too long. The snow-screens, Bill said, had once shown pictures from satellites in orbit around the Earth, but the cameras in those had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was more interesting. Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the Dark Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing but those lines.

“I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill told them. “Especially if he knew company might be coming. Won’t you have another sandwich? There are plenty, I assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you, Patrick? You’re too thin, you know—far, far too thin.”

Patrick turned his pad around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of Susannah, a tray of neatly cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the other. Like all of Patrick’s pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been produced with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland smiled and nodded. Patrick grinned, holding his teeth together so that the others wouldn’t have to look at the empty hole behind them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new.

“There’s a fleet of vehicles out back,” Bill said, “and while many of them no longer run, some still do. I can give you a truck with four-wheel drive, and while I cannot assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as far as the Dark Tower, which is no more than one hundred and twenty wheels from here.”

Susannah felt a great and fluttery lift-drop in her stomach. One hundred and twenty wheels was a hundred miles, perhaps even a bit less. They were close. So close it was scary.

“You would not want to come upon the Tower after dark,” Bill said. “At least I shouldn’t think so, considering the new resident. But what’s one more night camped at the side of the road to such great travelers as yourselves? Not much, I should say! But even with one last night on the road (and barring breakdowns, which the gods know are always possible), you’d have your goal in sight by mid-morning of tomorrowday.”

Roland considered this long and carefully. Susannah had to tell herself to breathe while he did so, because part of her didn’t want to.

I’m not ready, that part thought. And there was a deeper part—a part that remembered every nuance of what had become a recurring (and evolving) dream—that thought something else: I’m not meant to go at all. Not all the way.

At last Roland said: “I thank you, Bill—we all say thank you, I’m sure—but I think we’ll pass on your kind offer. Were you to ask me why, I couldn’t say. Only that part of me thinks that tomorrowday’s too soon. That part of me thinks we should go the rest of the way on foot, just as we’ve already traveled so far.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “I’m not ready to be there yet. Not quite ready.”

You too, Susannah marveled. You too.

“I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.” He reached into his back pocket and brought out the photocopy of the Robert Browning poem that had been left for them in Dandelo’s medicine chest. “There’s something writ in here about remembering the old times before coming to the last battle . . . or the last stand. It’s well-said. And perhaps, really, all I need is what this poet speaks of—a draught of earlier, happier sights. I don’t know. But unless Susannah objects, I believe we’ll go on foot.”

“Susannah doesn’t object,” she said quietly. “Susannah thinks it’s just what the doctor ordered. Susannah only objects to being dragged along behind like a busted tailpipe.”

Roland gave her a grateful (if distracted) smile—he seemed to have gone away from her somehow during these last few days—and then turned back to Bill. “I wonder if you have a cart I could pull? For we’ll have to take at least some gunna . . . and there’s Patrick. He’ll have to ride part of the time.”

Patrick looked indignant. He cocked an arm in front of him, made a fist, and flexed his muscle. The result—a tiny goose-egg rising on the biceps of his drawing-arm—seemed to shame him, for he dropped it quickly.

Susannah smiled and reached out to pat his knee. “Don’t look like that, sugar. It’s not your fault that you spent God knows how long caged up like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house.”

“I’m sure I have such a thing,” Bill said, “and a battery-powered version for Susannah. What I don’t have, I can make. It would take an hour or two at most.”

Roland was calculating. “If we leave here with five hours of daylight ahead of us, we might be able to make twelve wheels by sunset. What Susannah would call nine or ten miles. Another five days at that rather leisurely speed would bring us to the Tower I’ve spent my life searching for. I’d come to it around sunset if possible, for that’s when I’ve always seen it in my dreams. Susannah?”

And the voice inside—that deep voice—whispered: Four nights. Four nights to dream. That should be enough. Maybe more than enough. Of course, ka would have to intervene. If they had indeed outrun its influence, that wouldn’t—couldn’t—happen. But Susannah now thought ka reached everywhere, even to the Dark Tower. Was, perhaps, embodied by the Dark Tower.

“That’s fine,” she told him in a faint voice.

“Patrick?” Roland asked. “What do you say?”

Patrick shrugged and flipped a hand in their direction, hardly looking up from his pad. Whatever they wanted, that gesture said. Susannah guessed that Patrick understood little about the Dark Tower, and cared less. And why would he care? He was free of the monster, and his belly was full. Those things were enough for him. He had lost his tongue, but he could sketch to his heart’s content. She was sure that to Patrick, that seemed like more than an even trade. And yet . . . and yet . . .

He’s not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what is to become of us, then?

She didn’t know, but she was queerly unworried about it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams.

FOUR

An hour later the three humes, the bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cut-down wagon that looked like a slightly larger version of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi. The wheels were tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full, Susannah thought, it would be like pulling a feather. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still . . . and she thought there wouldn’t be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open lands, the prairie-lands; all the snow- and tree-covered ridges were behind them. Bill had provided her with an electric run-about that was more scooter than golf-cart. Her days of being dragged along behind (“like a busted tailpipe”) were done.

“If you’ll give me another half an hour, I can smooth this off,” Bill said, running a three-fingered steel hand along the edge where he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II.

“We say thankya, but it won’t be necessary,” Roland said. “We’ll lay a couple of hides over it, just so.”

He’s impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldn’t he be? I’m anxious to be off, myself.

“Well, if you say so, let it be so,” Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. “I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again?”

None of them answered that. They didn’t know.

“There’s a mighty loud horn on the roof,” Bill said, pointing at the Federal. “I don’t know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal—radiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attack—but I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-sensors as still work pick him up, I’ll set it off. Perhaps you’ll hear.”

“Thank you,” Roland said.

“Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,” Bill pointed out. “You’d reach the Tower and never have to see him.”

“That’s true enough,” Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad.

“What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command Can’-Ka No Rey?”

Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldn’t know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course.

“Well, there’ll be water if God wills it,” said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, “or so the old people did say. And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”

He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did—quite fervently, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for that, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was gentle.

“Long days and pleasant nights, Bill,” she said. “May you do well, and we all say so.”

“Thank you, madam,” he said and put her down. “I say thudda-thank, thumma-thank, thukka—” Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. “I say thank ya kindly.” He paused. “I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions.”

FIVE

Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it . . . and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.

When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.

He didn’t draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.

Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gentle touch. The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully. Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.

The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.

“What do you see?” she asked him.

“What do you see?” he asked in turn.

She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. “Well,” she said, “there’s Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there—oh my goodness!” She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. “That wasn’t there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn’t. That one’s in our world, Roland—we call it the Big Dipper!”

He nodded. “And once, according to the oldest books in my father’s library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia’s Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again.” He turned to her, smiling. “Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!”

SIX

Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.

SEVEN

She’s in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not “Silent Night” or “What Child Is This” but the Rice Song: “Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-come-commala!” She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and

(no twins here)

she is comforted.

She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.

Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It’s a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob’s of solid gold, and filigreed with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber #2’s, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.

Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It’s the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream. “Here,” he says, “I brought you hot chocolate.”

She ignores the outstretched cup. She’s fascinated by the door. “It’s like the ones along the beach, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Eddie says.

“No,” Jake says at the same time.

“You’ll figure it out,” they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.

She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland drew them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER. Writ upon this one is . And below that:

THE ARTIST

She turns back to them and they are gone.

Central Park is gone.

She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.

On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: “Time’s almost up . . . hurry . . .”

EIGHT

She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him . . . and best I do it before I can s’much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon. But where do I go? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?

This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though . . . Patrick was a . . . well, a pencil-slinger. Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn’t kill much with an Eberhard-Faber unless it was very sharp.

She’d sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadn’t noticed. And she didn’t want him to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she’d decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whistling sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on the bottom of the plate, the attachment that looked so much like Patrick’s pencil sharpener. She thought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that?

There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of the symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.

Time’s almost up. Hurry.

The next day her tears began.

NINE

There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open. Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then the great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloud-like way. She caught her breath and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.

“Roland!” she said. “Yonder’s a herd of buffalo, or maybe they’re bison! Sure as death n taxes!”

“Aye, do you say so?” Roland asked, with only passing interest. “We called em bannock, in the long ago. It’s a good-sized herd.”

Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding the yellow barrel against his palm and shading with the tip. She could almost smell the dust boiling up from the herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Although it seemed to her that he’d taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own. That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes.

“There hasn’t been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years,” she said.

“Aye?” Still only polite interest. “But they’re in plenty here, I should say. If a little tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let’s take a couple. I’d like to taste some fresh meat that isn’t deer. Would you?”

She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man she’d believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she?

She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the ever-strengthening beat-beat-beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself.

Beat-beat-beat.

Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.

That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight.

“I think he’s out there someplace,” she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. “Watch well.”

“I will,” he said. “And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast.”

“You can count on it,” said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep.

And dreamed.

TEN

The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing “Come Go With Me,” the old Del-Vikings hit), Jake (I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT’S A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesn’t offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies. That is the main difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps it’s both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward.

A rather terrible question occurs to her: is she being purposely backward? Is there something here she doesn’t want to confront? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is fucking up communications? Surely that’s a stupid idea—these people she sees are but figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by a bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a car—one slain in this world, one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done (must be done, for there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet laureate.

Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic that seems to tell her You have it, Suze—you have what we want to show you, you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? It’s the fourth quarter. It’s the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your time-outs are gone. You have to hurry . . . hurry . . .

ELEVEN

She snapped awake with a gasp. It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet with sweat.

What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it you’d have me know?

To this question there was no answer. How could there be? Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down. She lay that way for another hour, but couldn’t get back to sleep.

TWELVE

Like Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like riding, Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own.

They stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to her.

“What fashes thee, Susannah? I’d have you tell me. I’d have you tell me dan-dinh, even though there’s no longer a tet and I’m your dinh no more.” He smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears back no more. Nor the truth.

“If I’m still with you when we see your Tower, Roland, things have gone all wrong.”

“How wrong?” he asked her.

She shook her head, beginning to weep harder. “There’s supposed to be a door. It’s the Unfound Door. But I don’t know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my dreams and tell me I know—they tell me with their eyes—but I don’t! I swear I don’t!”

He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasn’t bleeding, but it had begun to grow again.

“Let be what will be,” said the gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. “Let be what will be, and hush, and let ka work.”

“You said we’d outrun it.”

He rocked her in his arms, rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. “I was wrong,” he said. “As thee knows.”

THIRTEEN

It was her turn to watch early on the third night, and she was looking back behind them, northwest along the Tower Road, when a hand grasped her shoulder. Terror sprang up in her mind like a jack-in-the-box and she whirled

(he’s behind me oh dear God Mordred’s got around behind me and it’s the spider!)

with her hand going to the gun in her belt and yanking it free.

Patrick recoiled from her, his own face long with terror, raising his hands in front of him. If he’d cried out he would surely have awakened Roland, and then everything might have been different. But he was too frightened to cry out. He made a low sound in his throat and that was all.

She put the gun back, showed him her empty hands, then pulled him to her and hugged him. At first he was stiff against her—still afraid—but after a little he relaxed.

“What is it, darling?” she asked him, sotto voce. Then, using Roland’s phrase without even realizing it: “What fashes thee?”

He pulled away from her and pointed dead north. For a moment she still didn’t understand, and then she saw the orange lights dancing and darting. She judged they were at least five miles away, and she could hardly believe she hadn’t seen them before.

Still speaking low, so as not to wake Roland, she said: “They’re nothing but foo-lights, sugar—they can’t hurt you. Roland calls em hobs. They’re like St. Elmo’s fire, or something.”

But he had no idea of what St. Elmo’s fire was; she could see that in his uncertain gaze. She settled again for telling him they couldn’t hurt him, and indeed, this was the closest the hobs had ever come. Even as she looked back at them, they began to dance away, and soon most of them were gone. Perhaps she had thought them away. Once she would have scoffed at such an idea, but no longer.

Patrick began to relax.

“Why don’t you go back to sleep, honey? You need to take your rest.” And she needed to take hers, but she dreaded it. Soon she would wake Roland, and sleep, and the dream would come. The ghosts of Jake and Eddie would look at her, more frantic than ever. Wanting her to know something she didn’t, couldn’t know.

Patrick shook his head.

“Not sleepy yet?”

He shook his head again.

“Well then, why don’t you draw awhile?” Drawing always relaxed him.

Patrick smiled and nodded and went at once to Ho Fat for his current pad, walking in big exaggerated sneak-steps so as not to wake Roland. It made her smile. Patrick was always willing to draw; she guessed that one of the things that kept him alive in the basement of Dandelo’s hut had been knowing that every now and then the rotten old fuck would give him a pad and one of the pencils. He was as much an addict as Eddie had been at his worst, she reflected, only Patrick’s dope was a narrow line of graphite.

He sat down and began to draw. Susannah resumed her watch, but soon felt a queer tingling all over her body, as if she were the one being watched. She thought of Mordred again, and then smiled (which hurt; with the sore growing fat again, it always did now). Not Mordred; Patrick. Patrick was watching her.

Patrick was drawing her.

She sat still for nearly twenty minutes, and then curiosity overcame her. For Patrick, twenty minutes would be long enough to do the Mona Lisa, and maybe St. Paul’s Basilica in the background for good measure. That tingling sense was so queer, almost not a mental thing at all but something physical.

She went to him, but Patrick at first held the pad against his chest with unaccustomed shyness. But he wanted her to look; that was in his eyes. It was almost a love-look, but she thought it was the drawn Susannah he’d fallen in love with.

“Come on, honeybunch,” she said, and put a hand on the pad. But she would not tug it away from him, not even if he wanted her to. He was the artist; let it be wholly his decision whether or not to show his work. “Please?”

He held the pad against him a moment longer. Then—shyly, not looking at her—he held it out. She took it, and looked down at herself. For a moment she could hardly breathe, it was that good. The wide eyes. The high cheekbones, which her father had called “those jewels of Ethiopia.” The full lips, which Eddie had so loved to kiss. It was her, it was her to the very life . . . but it was also more than her. She would never have thought love could shine with such perfect nakedness from the lines made with a pencil, but here that love was, oh say true, say so true; love of the boy for the woman who had saved him, who had pulled him from the dark hole where he otherwise would surely have died. Love for her as a mother, love for her as a woman.

“Patrick, it’s wonderful!” she said.

He looked at her anxiously. Doubtfully. Really? his eyes asked her, and she realized that only he—the poor needy Patrick inside, who had lived with this ability all his life and so took it for granted—could doubt the simple beauty of what he had done. Drawing made him happy; this much he’d always known. That his pictures could make others happy . . . that idea would take some getting used to. She wondered again how long Dandelo had had him, and how the mean old thing had come by Patrick in the first place. She supposed she’d never know. Meantime, it seemed very important to convince him of his own worth.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is wonderful. You’re a fine artist, Patrick. Looking at this makes me feel good.”

This time he forgot to hold his teeth together. And that smile, tongueless or not, was so wonderful she could have eaten it up. It made her fears and anxieties seem small and silly.

“May I keep it?”

Patrick nodded eagerly. He made a tearing motion with one hand, then pointed at her. Yes! Tear it off! Take it! Keep it!

She started to do so, then paused. His love (and his pencil) had made her beautiful. The only thing to spoil that beauty was the black splotch beside her mouth. She turned the drawing toward him, tapped the sore on it, then touched it on her own face. And winced. Even the lightest touch hurt. “This is the only damned thing,” she said.

He shrugged, raising his open hands to his shoulders, and she had to laugh. She did it softly so as not to wake Roland, but yes, she did have to laugh. A line from some old movie had occurred to her: I paint what I see.

Only this wasn’t paint, and it suddenly occurred to her that he could take care of the rotten, ugly, painful thing. As it existed on paper, at least.

Then she’ll be my twin, she thought affectionately. My better half; my pretty twin sis—

And suddenly she understood—

Everything? Understood everything?

Yes, she would think much later. Not in any coherent fashion that could be written down—if a + b = c, then c – b = a and c – a = b—but yes, she understood everything. Intuited everything. No wonder the dream-Eddie and dream-Jake had been impatient with her; it was so obvious.

Patrick, drawing her.

Nor was this the first time she had been drawn.

Roland had drawn her to his world . . . with magic.

Eddie had drawn her to himself with love.

As had Jake.

Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family.

Ka-tet was love.

To draw is to make a picture with a pencil, or maybe charcoal.

To draw is also to fascinate, to compel, and to bring forward. To bring one out of one’s self.

The drawers were where Detta went to fulfill herself.

Patrick, that tongueless boy genius, pent up in the wilderness. Pent up in the drawers. And now? Now?

Now he my forspecial, thought Susanna/Odetta/Detta, and reached into her pocket for the glass jar, knowing exactly what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

When she handed back the pad without tearing off the sheet that now held her image, Patrick looked badly disappointed.

“Nar, nar,” said she (and in the voice of many). “Only there’s something I’d have you do before I take it for my pretty, for my precious, for my ever, to keep and know how I was at this where, at this when.”

She held out one of the pink rubber pieces, understanding now why Dandelo had cut them off. For he’d had his reasons.

Patrick took what she offered and turned it over between his fingers, frowning, as if he had never seen such a thing before. Susannah was sure he had, but how many years ago? How close might he have come to disposing of his tormentor, once and for all? And why hadn’t Dandelo just killed him then?

Because once he took away the erasers he thought he was safe, she thought.

Patrick was looking at her, puzzled. Beginning to be upset.

Susannah sat down beside him and pointed at the blemish on the drawing. Then she put her fingers delicately around Patrick’s wrist and drew it toward the paper. At first he resisted, then let his hand with the pink nubbin in it be tugged forward.

She thought of the shadow on the land that hadn’t been a shadow at all but a herd of great, shaggy beasts Roland called bannock. She thought of how she’d been able to smell the dust when Patrick began to draw the dust. And she thought of how, when Patrick had drawn the herd closer than it actually was (artistic license, and we all say thankya), it had actually looked closer. She remembered thinking that her eyes had adjusted and now marveled at her own stupidity. As if eyes could adjust to distance the way they could adjust to the dark.

No, Patrick had moved them closer. Had moved them closer by drawing them closer.

When the hand holding the eraser was almost touching the paper, she took her own hand away—this had to be all Patrick, she was somehow sure of it. She moved her fingers back and forth, miming what she wanted. He didn’t get it. She did it again, then pointed to the sore beside the full lower lip.

“Make it gone, Patrick,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “It’s ugly, make it gone.” Again she made that rubbing gesture in the air. “Erase it.”

This time he got it. She saw the light in his eyes. He held the pink nubbin up to her. Perfectly pink it was—not a smudge of graphite on it. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as if to ask if she was sure.

She nodded.

Patrick lowered the eraser to the sore and began to rub it on the paper, tentatively at first. Then, as he saw what was happening, he worked with more spirit.

FOURTEEN

She felt the same queer tingling sensation, but when he’d been drawing, it had been all over her. Now it was in only one place, to the right side of her mouth. As Patrick got the hang of the eraser and bore down with it, the tingling became a deep and monstrous itch. She had to clutch her hands deep into the dirt on either side of her to keep from reaching up and clawing at the sore, scratching it furiously, and never mind if she tore it wide open and sent a pint of blood gushing down her deerskin shirt.

It be over in a few more seconds, it have to be, it have to be, oh dear God please LET IT END—

Patrick, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about her. He was looking down at his picture, his hair hanging to either side of his face and obscuring most of it, completely absorbed by this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately . . . then a little harder (the itch intensified) . . . then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking. That itch was suddenly everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin clouds of gnats, it shivered at the very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard.

I’ll scream, I can’t help it, I have to scream—

She was drawing in her breath to do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain was gone, as well. She reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated.

I don’t dare.

You better dare! Detta responded indignantly. After all you been through—all we been through—you must have enough backbone left to touch yo’ own damn face, you yella bitch!

She brought her fingers down to the skin. The smooth skin. The sore which had so troubled her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when she looked in a mirror or a still pool of water, she would not even see a scar.

FIFTEEN

Patrick worked a little longer—first with the eraser, then with the pencil, then with the eraser again—but Susannah felt no itch and not even a faint tingle. It was as though, once he had passed some critical point, the sensations just ceased. She wondered how old Patrick had been when Dandelo snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young, anyway. She was sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro.

Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle, she thought. Once you learn how, you never forget.

She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long minutes, her patience was rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and showed her the picture. He had erased the blemish completely and then faintly shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber.

“Very nice,” she said, but that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasn’t it?

So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Patrick, it’s beautiful.”

The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it.

Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what would happen if she tore it—tore her—right down the middle. She noted as she did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the time he’d known her, and he had drawn it in near-photographic detail. Now it was gone—her exploring fingers told her so—yet Patrick wasn’t registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When he’d erased it from his drawing, he’d also erased it from his own mind and memory.

“Patrick?”

He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that she was also scared to death didn’t change that in the slightest.

“Will you draw something else for me?”

He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see:

?

She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly.

Susannah said: “I want you to draw me something that isn’t there.”

He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heart—Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what you meant.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”

And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah’s voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire, started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patrick’s magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslinger’s memory, too.

“Susannah, thy face! What’s happened to thy—”

“Hush, Roland, if you love me.”

The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze.

Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was bright under the stars.

Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the question-mark he had already drawn:

How tall?

Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about six-foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling.

“And look you at something that has to be on it,” she said, and took a branch from their little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didn’t think about them overmuch. She sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would either open on some place she didn’t want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness. Detta—brash, foulmouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her savior—might step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldn’t count on that. On her heart’s deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself.

So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement:

“Unfound,” Roland breathed. “Susannah, what—how—”

“Hush,” she repeated.

Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw.

SIXTEEN

She kept looking around for the door, but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very small even after Roland had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the prairie, at least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the blemish had been. Holding the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the eraser’s marks. Patrick had concealed what few traces he’d left behind with great cunning, and Roland had found them only with the closest scrutiny; it was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain.

“No wonder the old man cut off his erasers,” he said, giving the picture back to her.

“That’s what I thought.”

From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive leap: that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) un-create by erasing, he might be able to create by drawing. When she mentioned the herd of bannock that had seemed mysteriously closer, Roland rubbed his forehead like a man who has a nasty headache.

“I should have seen that. Should have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, I’m getting old.”

She ignored that—she’d heard it before—and told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake, being sure to mention the product-names on the sweatshirts, the choral voices, the offer of hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her.

“Why didn’t you tell me this dream before now?” Roland asked. “Why didn’t you ask for help in interpreting it?”

She looked at him steadily, thinking she had been right not to ask for his help. Yes—no matter how much that might hurt him. “You’ve lost two. How eager would you have been to lose me, as well?”

He flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. “Thee speaks ill of me, Susannah, and have thought worse.”

“Perhaps I have,” she said. “If so, I say sorry. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted myself. Part of me wants to see the Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if Patrick can draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, it’s not the real world it opens on. That’s what the names on the shirts mean, I’m sure of it.”

“You mustn’t think that,” Roland said. “Reality is seldom a thing of black and white, I think, of is and isn’t, be and not be.”

Patrick made a hooting sound and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned toward them so they could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the Unfound Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasn’t printed on it, and the doorknob was plain shiny metal—no crossed pencils adorned it—but that was all right. She hadn’t bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and understanding.

They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn

(riddle-de-dum)

mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory answer . . . except it was the human condition, wasn’t it? The answers that mattered never came easily.

Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an interrogative quality. She suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically dying of anxiety, and why not? He had just executed his first commission, and wanted to know what his patrono d’arte thought of it.

“It’s great, Patrick—terrific.”

“Yes,” Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to him exactly like those he’d found as he staggered along the beach of the Western Sea, delirious and dying of the lobstrosity’s poisoned bite. It was as if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his head and seen an actual picture of that door—a fottergraff.

Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around desperately. And when she began to swing along on her hands toward the edge of the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply, reminding her that Mordred might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordred’s friend.

Impatient as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well what had happened to Mordred’s body-mother, and how quickly it had happened. Yet it hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the coming day. If she was still with him, if she saw it with him, she thought its power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer. Now, given a choice between the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the door. But as they drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper and more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the door would be harder to do.

“I don’t see it,” she said despairingly. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is no damn door. Oh, Roland—”

“I don’t think you were wrong,” Roland told her. He spoke with obvious reluctance, but as a man will when he has a job to do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe this woman a debt, he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her into this world, where she’d learned the art of murder and fallen in love and been left bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her into this present sorrow? If he could make that right, he had an obligation to do so. His desire to keep her with him—and at the risk of her own life—was pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training.

More important than that, it was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect her. It broke what remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his strange and wonderful ka-tet, but if it was what she wanted, what she needed, then he must do it. And he thought he could do it, for he had seen something about the young man’s drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there; something that wasn’t.

“Look thee,” he said gently, showing her the picture. “Do you see how hard he’s tried to please thee, Susannah?”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course I do, but—”

“It took him ten minutes to do this, I should judge, and most of his drawings, good as they are, are the work of three or four at most, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t understand you!” She nearly screamed this.

Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the while looking at Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes.

“He worked so hard to give you what you want that there’s only the Door. It stands by itself, all alone on the paper. It has no . . . no . . .”

He searched for the right word. Vannay’s ghost whispered it dryly into his ear.

“It has no context!”

For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light of understanding began to break in her eyes. Roland didn’t wait; he simply dropped his good left hand on Patrick’s shoulder and told him to put the door behind Susannah’s little electric golf-cart, which she had taken to calling Ho Fat III.

Patrick was happy to oblige. For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him a reason to use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this time—almost carelessly, an observer might have said—but the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and didn’t think Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his pencil down, and as he did, there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark, streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more burned straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the electric cart, was a door Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis, in the Cave of the Voices.

SEVENTEEN

Susannah waited until dawn, at first passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside again—what would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag in which they were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would probably laugh anyway . . . or scream and run at the very sight of her. The Susannah Dean who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks not like a college graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say sorry. No, to civilized city people she’d probably look like some kind of freak-show escapee. And once she went through this door, would there be any going back? Never. Never in life.

So she put her gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go along with her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she told him, although she knew he didn’t remember that world at all—either he’d been taken from it too young, or the trauma of being snatched away had erased his memory.

Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was squatted on his hunkers, looking at him. “Either way, son,” the gunslinger said. “You can draw in either world, tell ya true. Although where she’s going, there’ll be more to appreciate it.”

He wants him to stay, she thought, and was angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his head a minute shake. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that meant—

And no, she didn’t just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while she’d known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her. To Detta, maybe, but not to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn’t told them all he knew, but outright lie . . . ? No. They’d been katet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the devil his due.

Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them:

I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new.

As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth.

And did she see relief on Roland’s face? If so, she hated him for it.

“All right, Patrick,” she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and patted his hand. “I understand how you feel. And while it’s true that people can be cruel . . . cruel and mean . . . there’s plenty who are kind. Listen, thee: I’m not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open.”

He nodded quickly. Grateful I ain’t goan try no harder t’change his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too!

Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.

EIGHTEEN

But as the day brightened (revealing a mediumsized herd of grazing bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air . . . and then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta thought, we’d see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.

She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out it wouldn’t. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the cart’s electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the cart’s little bullet nose almost touching it.

She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed make-believe smile.

“All ri’, Roland—Ah’ll say g’bye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you reach y’damn Tower, and—”

“No,” he said.

She looked at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing. Challenging him to turn this into something she didn’t want it to be. Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. C’mon, honky white boy, lessee you do it.

“What?” she asked. “What’s on yo’ mine, big boy?”

“I’d not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Only in Detta’s angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean?

“You know.”

She shook her head defiantly. Doan.

“For one thing,” he said, taking her trail-toughened left hand gently in his mutilated right one, “there’s another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I’m not speaking of Patrick.”

For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy.

“If Detta asks him, he’ll surely stay, for she’s never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him . . . why, then I don’t know.”

Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back—Susannah understood now that she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer wanted to be—but for now she was gone.

“Oy?” she said gently. “Will you come with me, honey? It may be we’ll find Jake again. Maybe not quite the same, but still . . .”

Oy, who had been almost completely silent during their trek across the Badlands and the White Lands of Empathica and the open rangelands, now spoke. “Ake?” he said. But he spoke doubtfully, as one who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry, and Detta all but guaranteed she wouldn’t cry, but now Detta was gone and the tears were here again.

“Jake,” she said. “You remember Jake, honey-bunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie.”

“Ake? Ed?” With a little more certainty now. He did remember.

“Come with me,” she urged, and Oy started forward as if he would jump up in the cart beside her. Then, with no idea at all why she should say it, she added: “There are other worlds than these.”

Oy stopped as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again, and she felt a moment of hope: perhaps there could still be some little ka-tet, a dan-tete-tet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shinnaro cameras.

Instead, Oy trotted back to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had walked far, those boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking was almost done.

“Olan,” said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice rolled a stone against her heart. She turned bitterly to the old man with the big iron on his hip.

“There,” she said. “You have your own glammer, don’t you? Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?”

“No,” said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such loneliness on a human face. “Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New York. Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while with me? That would make me happy.”

For a wild moment she thought she would. That she would simply turn the little electric cart from the door—which was one-sided and made no promises—and go with him to the Dark Tower. Another day would do it; they could camp at mid-afternoon and thus arrive tomorrow at sunset, as he wanted.

Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The young man holding out the cup of hot chocolate—the good kind, mit schlag.

“No,” she said softly. “I’ll take my chance and go.”

For a moment she thought he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his anger—no, his despair—broke in a painful burst. “But you can’t be sure! Susannah, what if the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even when the door’s open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll right through and into todash space?”

“Then I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love.”

“And that might work,” said he, speaking in the bitterest voice she had ever heard. “For the first ten years . . . or twenty . . . or even a hundred. And then? What about the rest of eternity? Think of Oy! Do you think he’s forgotten Jake? Never! Never! Never in your life! Never in his! He senses something wrong! Susannah, don’t. I beg you, don’t go. I’ll get on my knees, if that will help.” And to her horror, he began to do exactly that.

“It won’t,” she said. “And if this is to be my last sight of you—my heart says it is—then don’t let it be of you on your knees. You’re not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven, never were, and I don’t want to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as you were in Calla Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill.”

He got up and came to her. For a moment she thought he meant to restrain her by force, and she was afraid. But he only put his hand on her arm for a moment, and then took it away. “Let me ask you again, Susannah. Are you sure?”

She conned her heart and saw that she was. She understood the risks, but yes—she was. And why? Because Roland’s way was the way of the gun. Roland’s way was death for those who rode or walked beside him. He had proved it over and over again, since the earliest days of his quest—no, even before, since overhearing Hax the cook plotting treachery and thus assuring his death by the rope. It was all for the good (for what he called the White), she had no doubt of it, but Eddie still lay in his grave in one world and Jake in another. She had no doubt that much the same fate was waiting for Oy, and for poor Patrick.

Nor would their deaths be long in coming.

“I’m sure,” said she.

“All right. Will you give me a kiss?”

She took him by the arm and pulled him down and put her lips on his. When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death.

But not for you, gunslinger, she thought. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may I do fine.

She was the one who broke their kiss.

“Can you open the door for me?” she asked.

Roland went to it, and took the knob in his hand, and the knob turned easily within his grip.

Cold air puffed out, strong enough to blow Patrick’s long hair back, and with it came a few flakes of snow. She could see grass that was still green beneath light frost, and a path, and an iron fence. Voices were singing “What Child Is This,” just as in her dream.

It could be Central Park. Yes, it could be; Central Park of some other world along the axis, perhaps, and not the one she came from, but close enough so that in time she would know no difference.

Or perhaps it was, as he said, a glammer.

Perhaps it was the todash darkness.

“It could be a trick,” he said, most certainly reading her mind.

“Life is a trick, love a glammer,” she replied. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path.”

“As you say so, let it be so,” he told her. He put out one leg, the rundown heel of his boot planted in the earth, and bowed to her. Oy had begun to weep, but he sat firmly beside the gunslinger’s left boot. “Goodbye, my dear.”

“Goodbye, Roland.” Then she faced ahead, took in a deep breath, and twisted the little cart’s throttle. It rolled smoothly forward.

“Wait!” Roland cried, but she never turned, nor looked at him again. She rolled through the door. It slammed shut behind her at once with a flat, declamatory clap he knew all too well, one he’d dreamed of ever since his long and feverish walk along the edge of the Western Sea. The sound of the singing was gone and now there was only the lonely sound of the prairie wind.

Roland of Gilead sat in front of the door, which already looked tired and unimportant. It would never open again. He put his face in his hands. It occurred to him that if he had never loved them, he would never have felt so alone as this. Yet of all his many regrets, the re-opening of his heart was not among them, even now.

NINETEEN

Later—because there’s always a later, isn’t there?—he made breakfast and forced himself to eat his share. Patrick ate heartily, then withdrew to do his necessary while Roland packed up.

There was a third plate, and it was still full. “Oy?” Roland asked, tipping it toward the billy-bumbler. “Will’ee not have at least a bite?”

Oy looked at the plate, then backed away two firm steps. Roland nodded and tossed away the uneaten food, scattering it into the grass. Mayhap Mordred would come along in good time, and find something to his liking.

At mid-morning they moved on, Roland pulling Ho Fat II and Patrick walking along beside with his head hung low. And soon the beat of the Tower filled the gunslinger’s head again. Very close now. That steady, pulsing power drove out all thoughts of Susannah, and he was glad. He gave himself to the steady beating and let it sweep away all his thoughts and all his sorrow.

Commala-come-come, sang the Dark Tower, now just over the horizon. Commala-come-come, gunslinger may ya come.

Commala-come-Roland, the journey’s nearly done.

CHAPTER II:
MORDRED

ONE

The dan-tete was watching when the long-haired fellow they were now traveling with grabbed Susannah’s shoulder to point out the dancing orange hobs in the distance. Mordred watched as she whirled, pulling one of the White Daddy’s big revolvers. For a moment the far-seeing glass eyes he’d found in the house on Odd’s Lane trembled in Mordred’s hand, that was how hard he was rooting for his Blackbird Mommy to shoot the Artist. How the guilt would have bitten into her! Like the blade of a dull hatchet, yar! It was even possible that, overcome by the horror of what she had done, she’d’ve put the barrel of the gun to her own head and pulled the trigger a second time, and how would Old White Daddy like waking up to that?

Ah, children are such dreamers.

It didn’t happen, of course, but there had been much more to watch. Some of it was hard to see, though. Because it wasn’t just excitement that made the binoculars tremble. He was dressed warmly now, in layers of Dandelo’s hume clothes, but he was still cold. Except when he was hot. And either way, hot or cold, he trembled like a toothless old gaffer in a chimney corner. This state of affairs had been growing gradually worse since he left Joe Collins’s house behind. Fever roared in his bones like a blizzard wind. Mordred was no longer a-hungry (for Mordred no longer had an appetite), but Mordred was a-sick, a-sick, a-sick.

In truth, he was afraid Mordred might be a-dying.

Nonetheless he watched Roland’s party with great interest, and once the fire was replenished, he saw even better. Saw the door come into being, although he could not read the symbols there writ upon. He understood that the Artist had somehow drawn it into being—what a godlike talent that was! Mordred longed to eat him just on the chance such a talent might be transmittable! He doubted it, the spiritual side of cannibalism was greatly overrated, but what harm in seeing for one’s self?

He watched their palaver. He saw—and also understood—her plea to the Artist and the Mutt, her whining entreaties

(come with me so I don’t have to go alone, come on, be a sport, in fact be a couple of sports, oh boo-hoo)

and rejoiced in her sorrow and fury when the plea was rejected by both boy and beast; Mordred rejoiced even though he knew it would make his own job harder. (A little harder, anyway; how much trouble could a mute young man and a billy-bumbler really give him, once he changed his shape and made his move?) For a moment he thought that, in her anger, she might shoot Old White Daddy with his own gun, and that Mordred did not want. Old White Daddy was meant to be his. The voice from the Dark Tower had told him so. A-sick he surely was, a-dying he might be, but Old White Daddy was still meant to be his meal, not the Blackbird Mommy’s. Why, she’d leave the meat to rot without taking a single bite! But she didn’t shoot him. Instead she kissed him. Mordred didn’t want to see that, it made him feel sicker than ever, and so he put the binoculars aside. He lay in the grass amid a little clump of alders, trembling, hot and cold, trying not to puke (he had spent the entire previous day puking and shitting, it seemed, until the muscles of his midsection ached with the strain of sending such heavy traffic in two directions at once and nothing came up his throat but thick, mucusy strings and nothing out of his backside but brown stew and great hollow farts), and when he looked through the binoculars again, it was just in time to see the back end of the little electric cart disappear as the Blackbird Mommy drove it through the door. Something swirled out around it. Dust, maybe, but he thought snow. There was also singing. The sound of it made him feel almost as sick as seeing her kiss Old White Gunslinger Daddy. Then the door slammed shut behind her and the singing was gone and the gunslinger just sat there near it, with his face in his hands, boohoo, sob-sob. The bumbler went to him and put its long snout on one of his boots as if to offer comfort, how sweet, how puking sweet. By then it was dawn, and Mordred dozed a little. When he woke up, it was to the sound of Old White Daddy’s voice. Mordred’s hiding place was downwind, and the words came to him clearly: “Oy? Will’ee not have at least a bite?” The bumbler would not, however, and the gunslinger had scattered the food that had been meant for the little furry houken. Later, after they moved on (Old White Gunslinger Daddy pulling the cart the robot had made for them, plodding slowly along the ruts of Tower Road with his head down and his shoulders all a-slump), Mordred crept to the campsite. He did indeed eat some of the scattered food—surely it had not been poisoned if Roland had hoped it would go down the bumbler’s gullet—but he stopped after only three or four chunks of meat, knowing that if he went on eating, his guts would spew everything back out, both north and south. He couldn’t have that. If he didn’t hold onto at least some nourishment, he would be too weak to follow them. And he must follow, had to stay close a little while longer. It would have to be tonight. It would have to be, because tomorrow Old White Daddy would reach the Dark Tower, and then it would almost certainly be too late. His heart told him so. Mordred plodded as Roland had, but even more slowly. Every now and then he would double over as cramps seized him and his human shape wavered, that blackness rising and receding under his skin, his heavy coat bulging restlessly as the other legs tried to burst free, then hanging slack again as he willed them back inside, gritting his teeth and groaning with effort. Once he shit a pint or so of stinky brown fluid in his pants, and once he managed to get his trousers down, and he cared little either way. No one had invited him to the Reap Ball, ha-ha! Invitation lost in the mail, no doubt! Later, when it came time to attack, he would let the little Red King free. But if it happened now, he was almost positive he wouldn’t be able to change back again. He wouldn’t have the strength. The spider’s faster metabolism would fan the sickness the way a strong wind fans a low ground-fire into a forest-gobbling blaze. What was killing him slowly would kill him rapidly, instead. So he fought it, and by afternoon he felt a little better. The pulse from the Tower was growing rapidly now, growing in strength and urgency. So was his Red Daddy’s voice, urging him on, urging him to stay within striking distance. Old White Gunslinger Daddy had gotten no more than four hours’ sleep a night for weeks now, because he had been standing watch-and-watch with the now-departed Blackbird Mommy. But Blackbird Mommy hadn’t ever had to pull that cart, had she? No, just rode in it like Queen Shit o’ Turd Hill did she, hee! Which meant Old White Gunslinger Daddy was plenty tired, even with the pulse of the Dark Tower to buoy him up and pull him onward. Tonight Old White Daddy would either have to depend on the Artist and the Mutt to stand the first watch or try to do the whole thing on his own. Mordred thought he could stand one more wakeful night himself, simply because he knew he’d never have to have another. He would creep close, as he had the previous night. He would watch their camp with the old man-monster’s glass eyes for far-seeing. And when they were all asleep, he would change for the last time and rush down upon them. Scrabble-de-dee comes me, hee! Old White Daddy might never even wake up, but Mordred hoped he would. At the very end. Just long enough to realize what was happening to him. Just long enough to know that his son was snatching him into the land of death only hours before he would have reached his precious Dark Tower. Mordred clenched his fists and watched the fingers turn black. He felt the terrible but pleasurable itching up the sides of his body as the spider-legs tried to burst through—seven instead of eight, thanks to the terriblenastyawful Blackbird Mommy who had been both preg and not-preg at the same time, and might she rot screaming in todash space forever (or at least until one of the Great Ones who lurked there found her). He fought and encouraged the change with equal ferocity. At last he only fought it, and the urge to change subsided. He gave out a victory-fart, but although this one was long and smelly, it was silent. His asshole was now a broken squeeze-box that could no longer make music but only gasp. His fingers returned to their normal pinkish-white shade and the itching up and down the sides of his body disappeared. His head swam and slithered with fever; his thin arms (little more than sticks) ached with chills. The voice of his Red Daddy was sometimes loud and sometimes faint, but it was always there: Come to me. Run to me. Hie thy doubleton self. Come-commala, you good son of mine. We’ll bring the Tower down, we’ll destroy all the light there is, and then rule the darkness together.

Come to me.

Come.

TWO

Surely those three who remained (four, counting himself) had outrun ka’s umbrella. Not since the Prim receded had there been such a creature as Mordred Deschain, who was part hume and part of that rich and potent soup. Surely such a creature could never have been meant by ka to die such a mundane death as the one that now threatened: fever brought on by food-poisoning.

Roland could have told him that eating what he found in the snow around to the side of Dandelo’s barn was a bad idea; so could Robert Browning, for that matter. Wicked or not, actual horse or not, Lippy (probably named after another, and better-known, Browning poem called “Fra Lippo Lippi”) had been a sick animal herself when Roland ended her life with a bullet to the head. But Mordred had been in his spider-form when he’d come upon the thing which at least looked like a horse, and almost nothing would have stopped him from eating the meat. It wasn’t until he’d resumed his human form again that he wondered uneasily how there could be so much meat on Dandelo’s bony old nag and why it had been so soft and warm, so full of uncoagulated blood. It had been in a snowdrift, after all, and had been lying there for some days. The mare’s remains should have been frozen stiff.

Then the vomiting began. The fever came next, and with it the struggle not to change until he was close enough to his Old White Daddy to rip him limb from limb. The being whose coming had been prophesied for thousands of years (mostly by the Manni-folk, and usually in frightened whispers), the being who would grow to be half-human and half-god, the being who would oversee the end of humanity and the return of the Prim . . . that being had finally arrived as a naïve and bad-hearted child who was now dying from a bellyful of poisoned horsemeat.

Ka could have had no part in this.

THREE

Roland and his two companions didn’t make much progress on the day Susannah left them. Even had he not planned to travel short miles so that they could come to the Tower at sunset of the day following, Roland wouldn’t have been able to go far. He was disheartened, lonely, and tired almost to death. Patrick was also tired, but he at least could ride if he chose to, and for most of that day he did so choose, sometimes napping, sometimes sketching, sometimes walking a little while before climbing back into Ho Fat II and napping some more.

The pulse from the Tower was strong in Roland’s head and heart, and its song was powerful and lovely, now seemingly composed of a thousand voices, but not even these things could take the lead from his bones. Then, as he was looking for a shady spot where they could stop and eat a little midday meal (by now it was actually mid-afternoon), he saw something that momentarily made him forget both his weariness and his sorrow.

Growing by the side of the road was a wild rose, seemingly the exact twin of the one in the vacant lot. It bloomed in defiance of the season, which Roland put as very early spring. It was a light pink shade on the outside and darkened to a fierce red on the inside; the exact color, he thought, of heart’s desire. He fell on his knees before it, tipped his ear toward that coral cup, and listened.

The rose was singing.

The weariness stayed, as weariness will (on this side of the grave, at least), but the loneliness and the sadness departed, at least for a little while. He peered into the heart of the rose and saw a yellow center so bright he couldn’t look directly at it.

Gan’s gateway, he thought, not sure exactly what that was but positive that he was right. Aye, Gan’s gateway, so it is!

This was unlike the rose in the vacant lot in one crucial way: the feeling of sickness and the faint voices of discord were gone. This one was rich with health as well as full of light and love. It and all the others . . . they . . . they must . . .

They feed the Beams, don’t they? With their songs and their perfume. As the Beams feed them. It’s a living force-field, a giving and taking, all spinning out from the Tower. And this is only the first, the farthest outrider. In Can’-Ka No Rey there are tens of thousands, just like this.

The thought made him faint with amazement. Then came another that filled him with anger and fear: the only one with a view of that great red blanket was insane. Would blight them all in an instant, if allowed free rein to do so.

There was a hesitant tap on his shoulder. It was Patrick, with Oy at his heel. Patrick pointed to the grassy area beside the rose, then made eating gestures. Pointed at the rose and made drawing motions. Roland wasn’t very hungry, but the boy’s other idea pleased him a great deal.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll have a bite here, then maybe I’ll take me a little siesta while you draw the rose. Will you make two pictures of it, Patrick?” He showed the two remaining fingers on his right hand to make sure Patrick understood.

The young man frowned and cocked his head, still not understanding. His hair hung to one shoulder in a bright sheaf. Roland thought of how Susannah had washed that hair in a stream in spite of Patrick’s hooted protests. It was the sort of thing Roland himself would never have thought to do, but it made the young fellow look a lot better. Looking at that sheaf of shining hair made him miss Susannah in spite of the rose’s song. She had brought grace to his life. It wasn’t a word that had occurred to him until she was gone.

Meanwhile, here was Patrick, wildly talented but awfully slow on the uptake.

Roland gestured to his pad, then to the rose. Patrick nodded—that part he got. Then Roland raised two of the fingers on his good hand and pointed to the pad again. This time the light broke on Patrick’s face. He pointed to the rose, to the pad, to Roland, and then to himself.

“That’s right, big boy,” Roland said. “A picture of the rose for you and one for me. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

Patrick nodded enthusiastically, setting to work while Roland rustled the grub. Once again Roland fixed three plates, and once again Oy refused his share. When Roland looked into the bumbler’s gold-ringed eyes he saw an emptiness there—a kind of loss—that hurt him deep inside. And Oy couldn’t stand to miss many meals; he was far too thin already. Trail-frayed, Cuthbert would have said, probably smiling. In need of some hot sassafras and salts. But the gunslinger had no sassy here.

“Why do’ee look so?” Roland asked the bumbler crossly. “If’ee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had the chance! Why will’ee cast thy sad houken’s eyes on me now?”

Oy looked at him a moment longer, and Roland saw that he had hurt the little fellow’s feelings; ridiculous but true. Oy walked away, little squiggle of tail drooping. Roland felt like calling him back, but that would have been more ridiculous yet, would it not? What plan did he have? To apologize to a billy-bumbler?

He felt angry and ill at ease with himself, feelings he had never suffered before hauling Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from America-side into his life. Before they’d come he’d felt almost nothing, and while that was a narrow way to live, in some ways it wasn’t so bad; at least you didn’t waste time wondering if you should apologize to animals for taking a high tone to them, by the gods.

Roland hunkered by the rose, leaning into the soothing power of its song and the blaze of light—healthy light—from its center. Then Patrick hooted at him, gesturing for Roland to move away so he could see it and draw it. This added to Roland’s sense of dislocation and annoyance, but he moved back without a word of protest. He had, after all, asked Patrick to draw it, hadn’t he? He thought of how, if Susannah had been here, their eyes would have met with amused understanding, as the eyes of parents do over the antics of a small child. But she wasn’t here, of course; she’d been the last of them and now she was gone, too.

“All right, can’ee see howgit rosen-gaff a tweakit better?” he asked, striving to sound comic and only sounding cross—cross and tired.

Patrick, at least, didn’t react to the harshness in the gunslinger’s tone; probably didn’t even ken what I said, Roland thought. The mute boy sat with his ankles crossed and his pad balanced on his thighs, his half-finished plate of food set off to one side.

“Don’t get so busy you forget to eat that,” Roland said. “You mind me, now.” He got another distracted nod for his pains and gave up. “I’m going to snooze, Patrick. It’ll be a long afternoon.” And an even longer night, he added to himself . . . and yet he had the same consolation as Mordred: tonight would likely be the last. He didn’t know for sure what waited for him in the Dark Tower at the end of the field of roses, but even if he managed to put paid to the Crimson King, he felt quite sure that this was his last march. He didn’t believe he would ever leave Can’-Ka No Rey, and that was all right. He was very tired. And, despite the power of the rose, sad.

Roland of Gilead put an arm over his eyes and was asleep at once.

FOUR

He didn’t sleep for long before Patrick woke him with a child’s enthusiasm to show him the first picture of the rose he’d drawn—the sun suggested no more than ten minutes had passed, fifteen at most.

Like all of his drawings, this one had a queer power. Patrick had captured the rose almost to the life, even though he had nothing but a pencil to work with. Still, Roland would much have preferred another hour’s sleep to this exercise in art appreciation. He nodded his approval, though—no more grouch and grump in the presence of such a lovely thing, he promised himself—and Patrick smiled, happy even with so little. He tossed back the sheet and began drawing the rose again. One picture for each of them, just as Roland had asked.

Roland could have slept again, but what was the point? The mute boy would be done with the second picture in a matter of minutes and would only wake him again. He went to Oy instead, and stroked the bumbler’s dense fur, something he rarely did.

“I’m sorry I spoke rough to’ee, fella,” Roland said. “Will you not set me on with a word?”

But Oy would not.

Fifteen minutes later, Roland re-packed the few things he’d taken out of the cart, spat into his palms, and hoisted the handles again. The cart was lighter now, had to be, but it felt heavier.

Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.

Soon Ho Fat II had Patrick Danville in it, as well. He crawled up, made himself a little nest, and fell asleep almost at once. Roland plodded on, head down, shadow growing longer at his heels. Oy walked beside him.

One more night, the gunslinger thought. One more night, one more day to follow, and then it’s done. One way or t’ other.

He let the pulse of the Tower and its many singing voices fill his head and lighten his heels . . . at least a little. There were more roses now, dozens scattered on either side of the road and brightening the otherwise dull countryside. A few were growing in the road itself and he was careful to detour around them. Tired though he might be, he would not crush a single one, or roll a wheel over a single fallen petal.

FIVE

He stopped for the night while the sun was still well above the horizon, too weary to go farther even though there would be at least another two hours of daylight. Here was a stream that had gone dry, but in its bed grew a riot of those beautiful wild roses. Their songs didn’t diminish his weariness, but they revived his spirit to some extent. He thought this was true for Patrick and Oy, as well, and that was good. When Patrick had awakened he’d looked around eagerly at first. Then his face had darkened, and Roland knew he was realizing all over again that Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be no crying here.

There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank—at least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods—but they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah’s world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSIT against the deepening sky.

Before making a fire and cooking them an early supper—canned goods from Dandelo’s pantry would do well enough tonight, he reckoned—Roland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses, strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the smell and the sound were refreshing.

Feeling a little better, he gathered wood from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of Patrick’s pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light, speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it: “Spark-a-dark, who’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.”

While he waited for the fire to first grow and then die down to a bed of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York. Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it would last for fifty years.

Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, the hands had very slowly begun to move backward.

He looked at this for a little while, fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there: key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam from the windows that spiraled upward.

They didn’t know it would do that, he thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket, checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well.

Oy would touch not a single bite.

SIX

Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in black—the night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deck—those twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the longest of Roland’s life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched in front of his heavy eyes: Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestling in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced around them, barking.

Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer to the edge of unconsciousness. Each time he expected to see the spider with the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs, dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of the wind.

But he waits. He bides. And if I sleep—when I sleep—he’ll be on us.

Around three in the morning he roused himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hide-covered hump. Of Oy there was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jake’s old friend a little beyond the edge of the failing firelight—or at least the gleam of his gold-ringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared, probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws.

He’s tired, too, Roland thought, and why not?

The question of what would become of Oy after tomorrow tried to rise to the surface of the gunslinger’s troubled, tired mind, and Roland pushed it away. He got up (in his weariness his hands slipped down to his formerly troublesome hip, as if expecting to find the pain still there), went to Patrick, and shook him awake. It took some doing, but at last the boy’s eyes opened. That wasn’t good enough for Roland. He grasped Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. When the boy tried to slump back down again, Roland shook him. Hard. He looked at Roland with dazed incomprehension.

“Help me build up the fire, Patrick.”

Doing that should wake him up at least a little. And once the fire was burning bright again, Patrick would have to stand a brief watch. Roland didn’t like the idea, knew full well that leaving Patrick in charge of the night would be dangerous, but trying to watch the rest of it on his own would be even more dangerous. He needed sleep. An hour or two would be enough, and surely Patrick could stay awake that long.

Patrick was willing enough to gather up some sticks and put them on the fire, although he moved like a bougie—a reanimated corpse. And when the fire was blazing, he slumped back down in his former place with his arms between his bony knees, already more asleep than awake. Roland thought he might actually have to slap the boy to bring him around, and would later wish—bitterly—that he had done just that.

“Patrick, listen to me.” He shook Patrick by the shoulders hard enough to make his long hair fly, but some of it flopped back into his eyes. Roland brushed it away. “I need you to stay awake and watch. Just for an hour . . . just until . . . look up, Patrick! Look! Gods, don’t you dare go to sleep on me again! Do you see that? The brightest star of all those close to us!”

It was Old Mother Roland was pointing to, and Patrick nodded at once. There was a gleam of interest in his eye now, and the gunslinger thought that was encouraging. It was Patrick’s “I want to draw” look. And if he sat drawing Old Mother as she shone in the widest fork of the biggest dead cottonwood, then the chances were good that he’d stay awake. Maybe until dawn, if he got fully involved.

“Here, Patrick.” He made the boy sit against the base of the tree. It was bony and knobby and—Roland hoped—uncomfortable enough to prohibit sleep. All these movements felt to Roland like the sort you made underwater. Oh, he was tired. So tired. “Do you still see the star?”

Patrick nodded eagerly. He seemed to have thrown off his sleepiness, and the gunslinger thanked the gods for this favor.

“When it goes behind that thick branch and you can’t see it or draw it anymore without getting up . . . you call me. Wake me up, no matter how hard it is. Do you understand?”

Patrick nodded at once, but Roland had now traveled with him long enough to know that such a nod meant little or nothing. Eager to please, that’s what he was. If you asked him if nine and nine made nineteen, he would nod with the same instant enthusiasm.

“When you can’t see it anymore from where you’re sitting . . .” His own words seemed to be coming from far away, now. He’d just have to hope that Patrick understood. The tongueless boy had taken out his pad, at least, and a freshly sharpened pencil.

That’s my best protection, Roland’s mind muttered as he stumbled back to his little pile of hides between the campfire and Ho Fat II. He won’t fall asleep while he’s drawing, will he?

He hoped not, but supposed he didn’t really know. And it didn’t matter, because he, Roland of Gilead, was going to sleep in any case. He’d done the best he could, and it would have to be enough.

“An hour,” he muttered, and his voice was far and wee in his own ears. “Wake me in an hour . . . when the star . . . when Old Mother goes behind . . .”

But Roland was unable to finish. He didn’t even know what he was saying anymore. Exhaustion grabbed him and bore him swiftly away into dreamless sleep.

SEVEN

Mordred saw it all through the far-seeing glass eyes. His fever had soared, and in its bright flame, his own exhaustion had at least temporarily departed. He watched with avid interest as the gunslinger woke the mute boy—the Artist—and bullied him into helping him build up the fire. He watched, rooting for the mute to finish this chore and then go back to sleep before the gunslinger could stop him. That didn’t happen, unfortunately. They had camped near a grove of dead cottonwoods, and Roland led the Artist to the biggest tree. Here he pointed up at the sky. It was strewn with stars, but Mordred reckoned Old White Gunslinger Daddy was pointing to Old Mother, because she was the brightest. At last the Artist, who didn’t seem to be rolling a full barrow (at least not in the brains department) seemed to understand. He got out his pad and had already set to sketching as Old White Daddy stumbled a little way off, still muttering instructions and orders to which the Artist was pretty clearly paying absolutely no attention at all. Old White Daddy collapsed so suddenly that for a moment Mordred feared that perhaps the strip of jerky that served the son of a bitch as a heart had finally given up beating. Then Roland stirred in the grass, resettling himself, and Mordred, lying on a knoll about ninety yards west of the dry streambed, felt his own heartbeat slow. And deep though the Old White Gunslinger Daddy’s exhaustion might be, his training and his long lineage, going all the way back to the Eld himself, would be enough to wake him with his gun in his hand the second the Artist gave one of his wordless but devilishly loud cries. Cramps seized Mordred, the deepest yet. He doubled over, fighting to hold his human shape, fighting not to scream, fighting not to die. He heard another of those long flabbering noises from below and felt more of the lumpy brown stew begin coursing down his legs. But his preternaturally keen nose smelled more than excreta in this new mess; this time he smelled blood as well as shit. He thought the pain would never end, that it would go on deepening until it tore him in two, but at last it began to let up. He looked at his left hand and was not entirely surprised to see that the fingers had blackened and fused together. They would never come back to human again, those fingers; he believed he had but only one more change left in him. Mordred wiped sweat from his brow with his right hand and raised the bin-doculars to his eyes again, praying to his Red Daddy that the stupid mutie boy would be asleep. But he was not. He was leaning against the cottonwood tree and looking up between the branches and drawing Old Mother. That was the moment when Mordred Deschain came closest to despair. Like Roland, he thought drawing was the one thing that would likely keep the idiot boy awake. Therefore, why not give in to the change while he had the heat of this latest fever-spike to fuel him with its destructive energy? Why not take his chance? It was Roland he wanted, after all, not the boy; surely he could, in his spider form, sweep down on the gunslinger rapidly enough to grab him and pull him against the spider’s craving mouth. Old White Daddy might get off one shot, possibly even two, but Mordred thought he could take one or two, if the flying bits of lead didn’t find the white node on the spider’s back: his dual body’s brain. And once I pull him in, I’ll never let him go until he’s sucked dry, nothing but a dust-mummy like the other one, Mia. He relaxed, ready to let the change sweep over him, and then another voice spoke from the center of his mind. It was the voice of his Red Daddy, the one who was imprisoned on the side of the Dark Tower and needed Mordred alive, at least one more day, in order to set him free.

Wait a little longer, this voice counseled. Wait a little more. I might have another trick up my sleeve. Wait . . . wait just a little longer . . .

Mordred waited. And after a moment or two, he felt the pulse from the Dark Tower change.

EIGHT

Patrick felt that change, too. The pulse became soothing. And there were words in it, ones that blunted his eagerness to draw. He made another line, paused, then put his pencil aside and only looked up at Old Mother, who seemed to pulse in time with the words he heard in his head, words Roland would have recognized. Only these were sung in an old man’s voice, quavering but sweet:

“Baby-bunting, darling one,

Now another day is done.

May your dreams be sweet and merry,

May you dream of fields and berries.

Baby-bunting, baby-dear,

Baby, bring your berries here.

Oh chussit, chissit, chassit!

Bring enough to fill your basket!”

Patrick’s head nodded. His eyes closed . . . opened . . . slipped closed again.

Enough to fill my basket, he thought, and slept in the firelight.

NINE

Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in the middle of Mordred’s hot and melting brains. Now. Go to him and make sure he never rises from his sleep. Murder him among the roses and we’ll rule together.

Mordred came from hiding, the binoculars tumbling from a hand that was no longer a hand at all. As he changed, a feeling of huge confidence swept through him. In another minute it would be done. They both slept, and there was no way he could fail.

He rushed down on the camp and the sleeping men, a black nightmare on seven legs, his mouth opening and closing.

TEN

Somewhere, a thousand miles away, Roland heard barking, loud and urgent, furious and savage. His exhausted mind tried to turn away from it, to blot it out and go deeper. Then there was a horrible scream of agony that awoke him in a flash. He knew that voice, even as distorted by pain as it was.

“Oy!” he cried, leaping up. “Oy, where are you? To me! To m—”

There he was, twisting in the spider’s grip. Both of them were clearly visible in the light of the fire. Beyond them, sitting propped against the cottonwood tree, Patrick gazed stupidly through a curtain of hair that would soon be dirty again, now that Susannah was gone. The bumbler wriggled furiously to and fro, snapping at the spider’s body with foam flying from his jaws even as Mordred bent him in a direction his back was never meant to go.

If he’d not rushed out of the tall grass, Roland thought, that would be me in Mordred’s grip.

Oy sent his teeth deep into one of the spider’s legs. In the firelight Roland could see the coin-sized dimples of the bumbler’s jaw-muscles as he chewed deeper still. The thing squalled and its grip loosened. At that moment Oy might have gotten free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping away in the momentary freedom granted him before Mordred was able to re-set his grip, Oy used the time to extend his long neck and seize the place where one of the thing’s legs joined its bloated body. He bit deep, bringing a flood of blackish-red liquor that ran freely from the sides of his muzzle. In the firelight it gleamed with orange sparks. Mordred squalled louder still. He had left Oy out of his calculations, and was now paying the price. In the firelight, the two writhing forms were figures out of a nightmare.

Somewhere nearby, Patrick was hooting in terror.

Worthless whoreson fell asleep after all, Roland thought bitterly. But who had set him to watch in the first place?

“Put him down, Mordred!” he shouted. “Put him down and I’ll let you live another day! I swear it on my father’s name!”

Red eyes, full of insanity and malevolence, peered at him over Oy’s contorted body. Above them, high on the curve of the spider’s back, were tiny blue eyes, hardly more than pinholes. They stared at the gunslinger with a hate that was all too human.

My own eyes, Roland thought with dismay, and then there was a bitter crack. It was Oy’s spine, but in spite of this mortal injury he never loosened his grip on the joint where Mordred’s leg joined his body, although the steely bristles had torn away much of his muzzle, baring sharp teeth that had sometimes closed on Jake’s wrist with gentle affection, tugging him toward something Oy wanted the boy to see. Ake! he would cry on such occasions. Ake-Ake!

Roland’s right hand dropped to his holster and found it empty. It was only then, hours after she had taken her leave, that he realized Susannah had taken one of his guns with her into the other world. Good, he thought. Good. If it is the darkness she found, there would have been five for the things in it and one for herself. Good.

But this thought was also dim and distant. He pulled the other revolver as Mordred crouched on his hindquarters and used his remaining middle leg, curling it around Oy’s midsection and pulling the animal, still snarling, away from his torn and bleeding leg. The spider twirled the furry body upward in a terrible spiral. For a moment it blotted out the bright beacon that was Old Mother. Then he hurled Oy away from him and Roland had a moment of déjà vu, realizing he had seen this long ago, in the Wizard’s Glass. Oy arced across the fireshot dark and was impaled on one of the cottonwood branches the gunslinger himself had broken off for firewood. He gave an awful hurt cry—a death-cry—and then hung, suspended and limp, above Patrick’s head.

Mordred came at Roland without a pause, but his charge was a slow, shambling thing; one of his legs had been shot away only minutes after his birth, and now another hung limp and broken, its pincers jerking spasmodically as they dragged on the grass. Roland’s eye had never been clearer, the chill that surrounded him at moments like this never deeper. He saw the white node and the blue bombardier’s eyes that were his eyes. He saw the face of his only son peering over the back of the abomination and then it was gone in a spray of blood as his first bullet tore it off. The spider reared up, legs clashing at the black and star-shot sky. Roland’s next two bullets went into its revealed belly and exited through the back, pulling dark sprays of liquid with it. The spider slewed to one side, perhaps trying to run away, but its remaining legs would not support it. Mordred Deschain fell into the fire, casting up a flume of red and orange sparks. It writhed in the embers, the bristles on its belly beginning to burn, and Roland, grinning bitterly, shot it again. The dying spider rolled out of the now scattered fire on its back, its remaining legs twitching together in a knot and then spreading apart. One fell back into the fire and began to burn. The smell was atrocious.

Roland started forward, meaning to stamp out the little fires the scattered embers had started in the grass, and then a howl of outraged fury rose in his head.

My son! My only son! You’ve murdered him!

“He was mine, too,” Roland said, looking at the smoldering monstrosity. He could own the truth. Yes, he could do that much.

Come then! Come, son-killer, and look at your Tower, but know this—you’ll die of old age at the edge of the Can’-Ka before you ever so much as touch its door! I will never let you pass! Todash space itself will pass away before I let you pass! Murderer! Murderer of your mother, murderer of your friends—aye, every one, for Susannah lies dead with her throat cut on the other side of the door you sent her through—and now murderer of your own son!

“Who sent him to me?” Roland asked the voice in his head. “Who sent yonder child—for that’s what he is, inside that black skin—to his death, ye red boggart?”

To this there was no answer, so Roland re-holstered his gun and put out the patches of fire before they could spread. He thought of what the voice had said about Susannah, decided he didn’t believe it. She might be dead, aye, might be, but he thought Mordred’s Red Father knew for sure no more than Roland himself did.

The gunslinger let that thought go and went to the tree, where the last of his ka-tet hung, impaled . . . but still alive. The gold-ringed eyes looked at Roland with what might almost have been weary amusement.

“Oy,” Roland said, stretching out his hand, knowing it might be bitten and not caring in the least. He supposed that part of him—and not a small one, either—wanted to be bitten. “Oy, we all say thank you. I say thank you, Oy.”

The bumbler did not bite, and spoke but one word. “Olan,” said he. Then he sighed, licked the gunslinger’s hand a single time, hung his head down, and died.

ELEVEN

As dawn strengthened into the clear light of morning, Patrick came hesitantly to where the gunslinger sat in the dry streambed, amid the roses, with Oy’s body spread across his lap like a stole. The young man made a soft, interrogative hooting sound.

“Not now, Patrick,” Roland said absently, stroking Oy’s fur. It was dense but smooth to the touch. He found it hard to believe that the creature beneath it had gone, in spite of the stiffening muscles and the tangled places where the blood had now clotted. He combed these smooth with his fingers as best he could. “Not now. We have all the livelong day to get there, and we’ll do fine.”

No, there was no need to hurry; no reason why he should not leisurely mourn the last of his dead. There had been no doubt in the old King’s voice when he had promised that Roland should die of old age before he so much as touched the door in the Tower’s base. They would go, of course, and Roland would study the terrain, but he knew even now that his idea of coming to the Tower on the old monster’s blind side and then working his way around was not an idea at all, but a fool’s hope. There had been no doubt in the old villain’s voice; no doubt hiding behind it, either.

And for the time being, none of that mattered. Here was another one he had killed, and if there was consolation to be had, it was this: Oy would be the last. Now he was alone again except for Patrick, and Roland had an idea Patrick was immune to the terrible germ the gunslinger carried, for he had never been ka-tet to begin with.

I only kill my family, Roland thought, stroking the dead billy-bumbler.

What hurt most was remembering how unpleasantly he had spoken to Oy the day before. If’ee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had thy chance!

Had he stayed because he knew that Roland would need him? That when push came down to shove (it was Eddie’s phrase, of course), Patrick would fail?

Why will’ee cast thy sad houken’s eyes on me now?

Because he had known it was to be his last day, and his dying would be hard?

“I think you knew both things,” Roland said, and closed his eyes so he could feel the fur beneath his hands better. “I’m so sorry I spoke to’ee so—would give the fingers on my good left hand if I could take the words back. So I would, every one, say true.”

But here as in the Keystone World, time only ran one way. Done was done. There would be no taking back.

Roland would have said there was no anger left, that every bit of it had been burned away, but when he felt the tingling all over his skin and understood what it meant, he felt fresh fury rise in his heart. And he felt the coldness settle into his tired but still talented hands.

Patrick was drawing him! Sitting beneath the cottonwood just as if a brave little creature worth ten of him—no, a hundred!—hadn’t died in that very tree, and for both of them.

It’s his way, Susannah spoke up calmly and gently from deep in his mind. It’s all he has, everything else has been taken from him—his home world as well as his mother and his tongue and whatever brains he might once have had. He’s mourning, too, Roland. He’s frightened, too. This is the only way he has of soothing himself.

Undoubtedly all true. But the truth of it actually fed his rage instead of damping it down. He put his remaining gun aside (it lay gleaming between two of the singing roses) because having it close to hand wouldn’t do, no, not in his current mood. Then he rose to his feet, meaning to give Patrick the scolding of his life, if for no other reason than it would make Roland feel a little bit better himself. He could already hear the first words: Do you enjoy drawing those who saved your mostly worthless life, stupid boy? Does it cheer your heart?

He was opening his mouth to begin when Patrick put his pencil down and seized his new toy, instead. The eraser was half-gone now, and there were no others; as well as Roland’s gun, Susannah had taken the little pink nubbins with her, probably for no other reason than that she’d been carrying the jar in her pocket and her mind had been studying other, more important, matters. Patrick poised the eraser over his drawing, then looked up—perhaps to make sure he really wanted to erase at all—and saw the gunslinger standing in the streambed and frowning at him. Patrick knew immediately that Roland was angry, although he probably had no idea under heaven as to why, and his face cramped with fear and unhappiness. Roland saw him now as Dandelo must have seen him time and time again, and his anger collapsed at the thought. He would not have Patrick fear him—for Susannah’s sake if not his own, he would not have Patrick fear him.

And discovered that it was for his own sake, after all.

Why not kill him, then? asked the sly, pulsing voice in his head. Kill him and put him out of his misery, if thee feels so tender toward him? He and the bumbler can enter the clearing together. They can make a place there for you, gunslinger.

Roland shook his head and tried to smile. “Nay, Patrick, son of Sonia,” he said (for that was how Bill the robot had called the boy). “Nay, I was wrong—again—and will not scold thee. But . . .”

He walked to where Patrick was sitting. Patrick cringed away from him with a doglike, placatory smile that made Roland angry all over again, but he quashed the emotion easily enough this time. Patrick had loved Oy too, and this was the only way he had of dealing with his sorrow.

Little that mattered to Roland now.

He reached down and gently plucked the eraser out of the boy’s fingers. Patrick looked at him questioningly, then reached out his empty hand, asking with his eyes that the wonderful (and useful) new toy be given back.

“Nay,” Roland said, as gently as he could. “You made do for the gods only know how many years without ever knowing such things existed; you can make do the rest of this one day, I think. Mayhap there’ll be something for you to draw—and then undraw—later on. Do’ee ken, Patrick?”

Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited in Roland’s pocket along with the watch, he seemed to forget about it and just went back to his drawing.

“Put thy picture aside for a little, too,” Roland told him.

Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then to the Tower Road, and made his interrogative hooting sound.

“Aye,” Roland said, “but first we should see what Mordred had for gunna—there may be something useful there—and bury our friend. Will’ee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick?”

Patrick was willing, and the burial didn’t take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By mid-morning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road which led to the Dark Tower.

CHAPTER III:
THE CRIMSON KING AND THE DARK TOWER

ONE

The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high . . . but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you must mark yon two travelers walking toward us with great care. The older man—he with the tanned, lined face and the gun on his hip—is pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The younger one—he with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes him look like a student in days of old—is walking along beside it. They are climbing a long, gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of others they have climbed. The overgrown road they follow is lined on either side with the remains of rock walls; wild roses grow in amiable profusion amid the tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brush-dotted land beyond these fallen walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Rings of the sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and plinths has the look of Stonehenge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids gathered in the center of that great circle, perhaps casting the runes, but the keepers of these monuments, these precursors of the Great Monument, are all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where once they worshipped.

Never mind. It’s not old ruins we’ve come to observe near the end of our long journey, but the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait as he comes toward us. He comes. And comes. Relentless as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and the customs of the country; he is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much about him has changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to either side as he tops any hill—Always con yer vantage was Cort’s rule, and the last of his pupils has still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down . . . and stops. After a moment of staring at the broken, weed-infested paving of the road, he looks up again, more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in dread of what he thinks he has seen.

And it’s here we must join him—sink into him—although how we will ever con the vantage of Roland’s heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some moments are beyond imagination.

TWO

Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the hill, not because he expected trouble but because the habit was too deeply ingrained to break. Always con yer vantage, Cort had told them, drilling it into their heads from the time when they had been little more than babbies. He looked back down at the road—it was becoming more and more difficult to swerve among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so far—and then, belatedly, realized what he had just seen.

What you thought you saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road. It’s probably just another of the strange ruins we’ve been passing ever since we started moving again.

But even then Roland knew it wasn’t so. What he’d seen was not to either side of the Tower Road, but dead ahead.

He looked up again, hearing his neck creak like hinges in an old door, and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses, was the top of the Dark Tower. That which he had seen in a thousand dreams he now saw with his living eyes. Sixty or eighty yards ahead, the road rose to a higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the ivy and honeysuckle on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center of this near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny portion of the blue sky.

Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of his hooting sounds.

“Do you see it?” Roland asked. His voice was dusty, cracked with amazement. Then, before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger pointed to what the boy wore around his neck. In the end, the binoculars had been the only item in Mordred’s little bit of gunna worth taking.

“Give them over, Pat.”

Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes, made a minute adjustment to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath as the top of the Tower sprang into view, seemingly close enough to touch. How much was visible over the horizon? How much was he looking at? Twenty feet? Perhaps as much as fifty? He didn’t know, but he could see at least three of the narrow slit-windows which ascended the Tower’s barrel in a spiral, and he could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him like the very Eye of Todash.

Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland handed the glasses over without a murmur. He felt light-headed, not really there. It occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some vast change, and that was what he felt now.

Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder is my destiny, the end of my life’s road. And yet my heart still beats (a little faster than before, ’tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt when I bend over to grasp the handles of this becurst cart my back will groan and I may pass a little gas. Nothing at all has changed.

He waited for the disappointment this thought surely presaged—the letdown. It didn’t come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed to begin in his mind and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since setting out at mid-morning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind. He felt free.

Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was excited. He pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint it, along with Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse. That I know, for I’ve seen the proof. As for now, it’s where we must go.”

Patrick hooted again, then pulled a long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed his head back and forth, like someone who has a terrible headache.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m afraid, too. But there’s no help for it. I have to go there. Would you stay here, Patrick? Stay and wait for me? If you would, I give you leave to do so.”

Patrick shook his head at once. And, just in case Roland didn’t take the point, the mute boy seized his arm in a hard grip. The right hand, the one with which he drew, was like iron.

Roland nodded. Even tried to smile. “Yes,” he said, “that’s fine. Stay with me as long as you like. As long as you understand that in the end I’ll have to go on alone.”

THREE

Now, as they rose from each dip and topped each hill, the Dark Tower seemed to spring closer. More of the spiraling windows which ran around its great circumference became visible. Roland could see two steel posts jutting from the top. The clouds which followed the Paths of the two working Beams seemed to flow away from the tips, making a great X-shape in the sky. The voices grew louder, and Roland realized they were singing the names of the world. Of all the worlds. He didn’t know how he could know that, but he was sure of it. That lightness of being continued to fill him up. Finally, as they crested a hill with great stone men marching away to the north on their left (the remains of their faces, painted in some blood-red stuff, glared down upon them), Roland told Patrick to climb up into the cart. Patrick looked surprised. He made a series of hooting noises Roland took to mean But aren’t you tired?

“Yes, but I need an anchor, even so. Without one I’m apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows better. And if plain old exhaustion doesn’t burst my heart, the Red King’s apt to take my head off with one of his toys. Get in, Patrick.”

Patrick did so. He rode sitting hunched forward, with the binoculars pressed against his eyes.

FOUR

Three hours later, they came to the foot of a much steeper hill. It was, Roland’s heart told him, the last hill. Can’-Ka No Rey was beyond. At the top, on the right, was a cairn of boulders that had once been a small pyramid. What remained stood about thirty feet high. Roses grew around its base in a rough crimson ring. Roland set this in his sights and took the hill slowly, pulling the cart by its handles. As he climbed, the top of the Dark Tower once more appeared. Each step brought a greater length of it into view. Now he could see the balconies with their waist-high railings. There was no need of the binoculars; the air was preternaturally clear. He put the distance remaining at no more than five miles. Perhaps only three. Level after level rose before his not-quite-disbelieving eye.

Just shy of this hill’s top, with the crumbling rock pyramid twenty paces ahead of them on the right, Roland stopped, bent, and set the handles of the cart on the road for the last time. Every nerve in his body spoke of danger.

“Patrick? Hop down.”

Patrick did so, looking anxiously into Roland’s face and hooting.

The gunslinger shook his head. “I can’t say why just yet. Only it’s not safe.” The voices sang in a great chorus, but the air around them was still. Not a bird soared overhead or sang in the distance. The wandering herds of bannock had all been left behind. A breeze soughed around them, and the grasses rippled. The roses nodded their wild heads.

The two of them walked on together, and as they did, Roland felt a timid touch against the side of his two-fingered right hand. He looked at Patrick. The mute boy looked anxiously back, trying to smile. Roland took his hand, and they crested the hill in that fashion.

Below them was a great blanket of red that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The road cut through it, a dusty white line perfectly straight and perhaps twelve feet wide. In the middle of the rose-field stood the sooty dark gray Tower, just as it had stood in his dreams; its windows gleamed in the sun. Here the road split and made a perfect white circle around the Tower’s base to continue on the other side, in a direction Roland believed was now dead east instead of south-by-east. Another road ran off at right angles to the Tower Road: to the north and south, if he was right in believing that the points of the compass had been re-established. From above, the Dark Tower would look like the center of a blood-filled gunsight.

“It’s—” Roland began, and then a great, crazed shriek floated to them on the breeze, weirdly undiminished by the distance of miles. It comes on the Beam, Roland thought. And it’s carried by the roses.

“GUNSLINGER!” screamed the Crimson King. “NOW YOU DIE!”

There was a whistling sound, thin at first and then growing, cutting through the combined song of the Tower and the roses like the keenest blade ever ground on a wheel dusted with diamonds. Patrick stood transfixed, peering dumbly at the Tower; he would have been blown out of his boots if not for Roland, whose reflexes were as quick as ever. He pulled the mute boy behind the heaped stone of the pyramid by their joined hands. There were other stones hidden in the high grass of dock and jimson; they stumbled over these and went sprawling. Roland felt the corner of one digging painfully into his ribs.

The whistle continued to rise, becoming an earsplitting whine. Roland saw a golden something flash past in the air—one of the sneetches. It struck the cart and it blew up, scattering their gunna every which way. Most of the stuff settled back to the road, cans rattling and bouncing, some of them burst.

Then came high, chattering laughter that set Roland’s teeth on edge; beside him, Patrick covered his ears. The lunacy in that laughter was almost unbearable.

“COME OUT!” urged that distant, mad, laughing voice. “COME OUT AND PLAY, ROLAND! COME TO ME! COME TO YOUR TOWER, AFTER ALL THE LONG YEARS WILL YOU NOT?”

Patrick looked at him, his eyes desperate and frightened. He was holding his drawing pad against his chest like a shield.

Roland peered carefully around the edge of the pyramid, and there, on a balcony two levels up from the Tower’s base, he saw exactly what he had seen in sai Sayre’s painting: one blob of red and three blobs of white; a face and two upraised hands. But this was no painting, and one of the hands moved rapidly forward in a throwing gesture and there came another hellish, rising whine. Roland rolled back against the tumble of the pyramid. There was a pause that seemed endless, and then the sneetch struck the pyramid’s other side and exploded. The concussion threw them forward onto their faces. Patrick screamed in terror. Rocks flew to either side in a spray. Some of them rattled down on the road, but Roland saw not a single piece of shrapnel strike so much as a single rose.

The boy scrambled to his knees and would have run—likely back into the road—but Roland grabbed him by the collar of his hide coat and yanked him down again.

“We’re safe enough here,” he murmured to Patrick. “Look.” He reached into a hole revealed by the falling rock, knocked on the interior with his knuckles, produced a dull ringing noise, and showed his teeth in a strained grin. “Steel! Yar! He can hit this thing with a dozen of his flying fireballs and not knock it down. All he can do is blast away the rocks and blocks and expose what lies beneath. Kennit? And I don’t think he’ll waste his ammunition. He can’t have much more than a donkey’s carry.”

Before Patrick could reply, Roland peered around the pyramid’s ragged edge once more. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed: “TRY AGAIN, SAI! WE’RE STILL HERE, BUT PERHAPS YOUR NEXT THROW WILL BE LUCKY!”

There was a moment of silence, then an insane scream: “EEEEEEEEEEE! YOU DON’T DARE MOCK ME! YOU DON’T DARE! EEEEEEEEEEE!”

Now came another of those rising whistles. Roland grabbed Patrick and fell on top of him, behind the pyramid but not against it. He was afraid it might vibrate hard enough when the sneetch struck to give them concussion injuries, or turn their soft insides to jelly.

Only this time the sneetch didn’t strike the pyramid. It flew past it instead, soaring above the road. Roland rolled off Patrick and onto his back. His eyes picked up the golden blur and marked the place where it buttonhooked back toward its targets. He shot it out of the air like a clay plate. There was a blinding flash and then it was gone.

“OH DEAR, STILL HERE!” Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasn’t easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.

Another crazed scream in response—“EEEEEEEEE!” Roland was amazed that the Red King didn’t split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he’d emptied—he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could—and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whistle, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he’d been famous in his time, this was it.

Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the world’s clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.

He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King’s back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.

“HOW SLOW YOU ARE!” the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. “TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!”

Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure’s feet, but wasn’t entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony’s floor and its railing obscured it.

Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn’t matter. Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time, Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he’d been made for.

Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.

The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony’s railing . . . and then peer directly into the gunslinger’s eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.

The King’s call drifted to him. “WAIT THEN, A BIT—AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOU’D GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND . . . LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!”

He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind . . . and what the King wanted him to hear.

The call of the Tower.

Come, Roland, sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can’-Ka No Rey, they came from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach . . . that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices weren’t constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, the level of the call grew stronger. He began to understand—and with growing horror—why in his dreams and visions he had always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon.

He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Tower’s strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able to stop him.

Come . . . come . . . became COME . . . COME . . . and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid.

Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that call—Roland understood this—but he knew what was happening.

FIVE

They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed.

“TRY AGAIN!” he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were carrying—the air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatic’s flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger.

“COME, GUNSLINGER!” the madman’s voice coaxed. “PERHAPS I’LL LET THEE COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT?”

To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice.

Yes, he thought grimly. And we’ll have coffee. Perhaps even a little fry-up.

He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower

(come, Roland come, gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey’s done)

was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end of the rose-field.

And the torture continued.

SIX

He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that something would occur to him, some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocket-watch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag, he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown out of his boots.

He would die among the roses.

“Patrick,” he said. His voice was husky.

Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boy’s hands—dirty, scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his own—and gave in. It occurred to him that he’d only held out as long as this from pride; he had wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the King what he’d done to the sore on Susannah’s face. But the pull of the Tower would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone.

“Change places with me, Patrick.”

Patrick did, scrambling carefully over Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road.

“Look through the far-seeing instrument. Lay it in that notch—yes, just so—and look.”

Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked back at him.

“Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man.” Not that he was a man, but at least he looked like one.

At first, however, Patrick only continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides of the gunslinger’s head in his hands and brought it forward until they were brow to brow.

Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Roland’s mind. It was not the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. He’s not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts.

Where had Roland heard those words before?

No time to think about it now.

“Are you saying you can’t?” Roland asked, injecting (with an effort) a note of disappointed incredulity into his voice. “That you can’t? That Patrick can’t? The Artist can’t?”

Patrick’s eyes changed. For a moment Roland saw in them the expression that would be there permanently if he grew to be a man . . . and the paintings in Sayre’s office said that he would do that, at least on some track of time, in some world. Old enough, at least, to paint what he had seen this day. That expression would be hauteur, if he grew to be an old man with a little wisdom to match his talent; now it was only arrogance. The look of a kid who knows he’s faster than blue blazes, the best, and cares to know nothing else. Roland knew that look, for had he not seen it gazing back at him from a hundred mirrors and still pools of water when he had been as young as Patrick Danville was now?

I can, came the voice in Roland’s head. I only say it won’t be easy. I’ll need the eraser.

Roland shook his head at once. In his pocket, his hand closed around what remained of the pink nubbin and held it tight.

“No,” he said. “Thee must draw cold, Patrick. Every line right the first time. The erasing comes later.”

For a moment the look of arrogance faltered, but only for a moment. When it returned, what came with it pleased the gunslinger mightily, and eased him a little, as well. It was a look of hot excitement. It was the look the talented wear when, after years of just moving sleepily along from pillar to post, they are finally challenged to do something that will tax their abilities, stretch them to their limits. Perhaps even beyond them.

Patrick rolled to the binoculars again, which he’d left propped aslant just below the notch. He looked long while the voices sang their growing imperative in Roland’s head.

And at last he rolled away, took up his pad, and began to draw the most important picture of his life.

SEVEN

It was slow work compared to Patrick’s usual method—rapid strokes that produced a completed and compelling drawing in only minutes. Roland again and again had to restrain himself from shouting at the boy: Hurry up! For the sake of all the gods, hurry up! Can’t you see that I’m in agony here?

But Patrick didn’t see and wouldn’t have cared in any case. He was totally absorbed in his work, caught up in the unknowing greed of it, pausing only to go back to the binoculars now and then for another long look at his red-robed subject. Sometimes he slanted the pencil to shade a little, then rubbed with his thumb to produce a shadow. Sometimes he rolled his eyes back in his head, showing the world nothing but the waxy gleam of the whites. It was as if he were conning some version of the Red King that stood a-glow in his brain. And really, how did Roland know that was not possible?

I don’t care what it is. Just let him finish before I go mad and sprint to what the Old Red King so rightly called “my darling.”

Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion. Once the Crimson King called more coaxingly than ever to Roland, asking if he would not come to the Tower and palaver, after all. Perhaps, he said, if Roland were to free him from his balcony prison, they might bury an arrow together and then climb to the top room of the Tower in that same spirit of friendliness. It was not impossible, after all. A hard rain made for queer bedfellows at the inn; had Roland never heard that saying?

The gunslinger knew the saying well. He also knew that the Red King’s offer was essentially the same false request as before, only this time dressed up in morning coat and cravat. And this time Roland heard worry lurking in the old monster’s voice. He wasted no energy on reply.

Realizing his coaxing had failed, the Crimson King threw another sneetch. This one flew so high over the pyramid it was only a spark, then dove down upon them with the scream of a falling bomb. Roland took care of it with a single shot and reloaded from a plentitude of shells. He wished, in fact, that the King would send more of the flying grenados against him, because they took his mind temporarily off the dreadful call of the Tower.

It’s been waiting for me, he thought with dismay. That’s what makes it so hard to resist, I think—it’s calling me in particular. Not to Roland, exactly, but to the entire line of Eld . . . and of that line, only I am left.

EIGHT

At last, as the descending sun began to take on its first hues of orange and Roland felt he could stand it no longer, Patrick put his pencil aside and held the pad out to Roland, frowning. The look made Roland afraid. He had never seen that particular expression in the mute boy’s repertoire. Patrick’s former arrogance was gone.

Roland took the pad, however, and for a moment was so amazed by what he saw there that he looked away, as if even the eyes in Patrick’s drawing might have the power to fascinate him; might perhaps compel him to put his gun to his temple and blow out his aching brains. It was that good. The greedy and questioning face was long, the cheeks and forehead marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the foaming beard were full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” came that screaming, lunatic voice. “IT WON’T DO YOU ANY GOOD, WHATEVER IT IS! I HOLD THE TOWER—EEEEEEEE!—I’M LIKE THE DOG WITH THE GRAPES, ROLAND! IT’S MINE EVEN IF I CAN’T CLIMB IT! AND YOU’LL COME! EEEEE! SAY TRUE! BEFORE THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER REACHES YOUR PALTRY HIDING-PLACE, YOU’LL COME! EEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE!”

Patrick covered his ears, wincing. Now that he had finished drawing, he registered those terrible screams again.

That the picture was the greatest work of Patrick’s life Roland had absolutely no doubt. Challenged, the boy had done more than rise above himself; he had soared above himself and committed genius. The image of the Crimson King was haunting in its clarity. The far-seeing instrument can’t explain this, or not all of it, Roland thought. It’s as if he has a third eye, one that looks out from his imagination and sees everything. It’s that eye he looks through when he rolls the other two up. To own such an ability as this . . . and to express it with something as humble as a pencil! Ye gods!

He almost expected to see the pulse begin to beat in the hollows of the old man’s temples, where clocksprings of veins had been delineated with only a few gentle, feathered shadings. At the corner of the full and sensuous lips, the gunslinger could see the wink of a single sharp

(tusk)

tooth, and he thought the lips of the drawing might come to life and part as he looked, revealing a mouthful of fangs: one mere wink of white (which was only a bit of unmarked paper, after all) made the imagination see all the rest, and even to smell the reek of meat that would accompany each outflow of breath. Patrick had perfectly captured a tuft of hair curling from one of the King’s nostrils, and a tiny thread of scar that wove in and out of the King’s right eyebrow like a bit of string. It was a marvelous piece of work, better by far than the portrait the mute boy had done of Susannah. Surely if Patrick had been able to erase the sore from that one, then he could erase the Crimson King from this one, leaving nothing but the balcony railing before him and the closed door to the Tower’s barrel behind. Roland almost expected the Crimson King to breathe and move, and so surely it was done! Surely . . .

But it was not. It was not, and wanting would not make it so. Not even needing would make it so.

It’s his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form. They were dreadfully good, but they weren’t right. Roland felt a kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard enough to make his teeth chatter. They’re not quite r—

Patrick took hold of Roland’s elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes.

Yes. His eyes. I know that! But what’s wrong with them?

Patrick was still touching the corners of his eyes. Overhead, a flock of rusties flew through a sky that would soon be more purple than blue, squalling the harsh cries that had given them their name. It was toward the Dark Tower that they flew; Roland arose to follow them so they should not have what he could not.

Patrick grabbed him by his hide coat and pulled him back. The boy shook his head violently, and this time pointed toward the road.

“I SAW THAT, ROLAND!” came the cry. “YOU THINK THAT WHAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BIRDS IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, DO YOU NOT? EEEEEEEEE! AND IT’S TRUE, SURE! SURE AS SUGAR, SURE AS SALT, SURE AS RUBIES IN KING DANDO’S VAULT—EEEEEEEE, HA! I COULD HAVE HAD YOU JUST NOW, BUT WHY BOTHER? I THINK I’D RATHER SEE YOU COME, PISSING AND SHAKING AND UNABLE TO STOP YOURSELF!”

As I will, Roland thought. I won’t be able to help myself. I may be able to hold here another ten minutes, perhaps even another twenty, but in the end . . .

Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come.

Roland shook his head wearily. “Even if I could fight the pull of the thing—and I couldn’t, it’s all I can do to bide here—retreat would do us no good. Once we’re no longer in cover, he’ll use whatever else he has. He has something, I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren’t likely to stop it.”

Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Roland’s arm tightened until the boy’s fingernails bit into the gunslinger’s flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quick jabbing gestures with the grimy fore-finger. Not at the road, however.

Patrick was pointing at the roses.

“What about them?” Roland asked. “Patrick, what about them?”

This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture.

And this time Roland understood.

NINE

Patrick didn’t want to get them. When Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch.

“I’ll shoot anything he sends,” Roland said. “You’ve seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could pick it myself, I would. But there’s not. So it has to be you who picks the rose and me who gives you cover.”

But Patrick only cringed back against the ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was that he didn’t know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target.

And Patrick would not. Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the boy—possibly even one—he might have broken through his terror. But he didn’t have that time. Sunset had almost come.

Besides, it’s close. I can do it if I have to . . . and I must.

The weather had warmed enough so there was no need for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one of them and cut off the end, so his two remaining fingers would poke through. What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on, then rested on one knee with his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The next was fully six feet further away.

Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking his head frantically.

“I have to,” Roland said, and of course he did. This was his job, not Patrick’s, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown apart here at the edge of Can’-Ka No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would cease.

The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him again, trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Roland’s coat and twisted him off-true. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose. The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the rose’s song, filling his head and threatening to split his skull.

The stem never did break. In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane.

Close. Very close, that time.

The Crimson King screamed his frustration—“EEEEEEEEEEE!”—and the cry was followed by multiple approaching whistles. Patrick pressed himself against the pyramid, face-first. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to make their turn. When they did, he took care of them: one and two and three.

“STILL HERE!” he cried at the old Red King. “STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER, MAY IT DO YA FINE!”

The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but sent no more sneetches.

“SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE!” he screamed. “LISTEN TO IT, ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALA-COME-COME!”

Now that song was all but imperative in Roland’s head. It burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped Patrick and turned him around. “Now,” he said. “For my life, Patrick. For the lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on.”

And child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory. Jake first hanging over darkness, then falling into it.

He stared into the mute boy’s terrified eyes. “Finish it! Show me that you can.”

TEN

Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn’t cut. Not so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation.

“ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSLINGER, FOR SUNSET’S ALMOST NIGH!”

And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn’t been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it.

And the rose sang Yes, Roland, yes—you’ll have it again. You’ll be whole again. There will be renewal. Only come.

Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not.

“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART?”

You’re a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o’clock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.

“Patrick, hurry,” he said. “Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up.”

Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson King’s robe. And the exact color of his lunatic’s eyes.

Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.

It’s still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in End-W—

Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger’s right hand and peered into it with the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting . . . hesitated . . . looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King’s left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gan’s face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.

Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.

The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and—to Roland, at least—immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain.

“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS! EEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Now finish the other,” Roland said. “Quickly! For your life and mine!”

Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patrick’s black-and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell’s own fire.

It was done.

Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. “Make him gone,” he said. “Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last.”

ELEVEN

There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawing—to that curl of nostril-hair, as it happened—the Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And in understanding.

Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. “Aye, Patrick. His time has come and you’re to be his executioner. Go on with it.”

The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears.

The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth’s during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs floating three-quarters of the way up the page.

All the rest of him was gone.

TWELVE

The shadow of the pyramid’s tip had come to touch the road; now the sky in the west changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron of blood Roland had seen in his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the call of the Tower doubled, then trebled. Roland felt it reach out and grasp him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was come.

Yet there was this boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the end of End-World if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet Patrick had come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally brought him to the Dark Tower. Roland’s family was dead; his misbegotten son had been the last. Now would Eld and Tower be joined.

First, though—or last—this.

“Patrick, listen to me,” he said, taking the boy’s shoulder with his whole left hand and his mutilated right. “If you’d live to make all the pictures ka has stored away in your future, ask me not a single question nor ask me to repeat a single thing.”

The boy looked at him, large-eyed and silent in the red and dying light. And the Song of the Tower rose around them to a mighty shout that was nothing but commala.

“Go back to the road. Pick up all the cans that are whole. That should be enough to feed you. Go back the way we came. Never leave the road. You’ll do fine.”

Patrick nodded with perfect understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good. Belief would protect him even more surely than a revolver, even one with the sandalwood grips.

“Go back to the Federal. Go back to the robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings open on America-side. If it won’t open to your hand, draw it open with thy pencil. Do’ee understand?”

Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood.

“If ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her Roland loves her still, and with all his heart.” He drew Patrick to him and kissed the boy’s mouth. “Give her that. Do’ee understand?”

Patrick nodded.

“All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing at the end of the path when all worlds end.”

Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now, and for him there would be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Eld’s line, the path ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine.

He rose to his feet. The boy looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad. Roland turned. He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.

“NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE GUN OF MY FATHER AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND!”

Patrick watched him stride to where the road ended, a black silhouette against that bloody burning sky. He watched as Roland walked among the roses, and sat shivering in the shadows as Roland began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and ka-mates; those names carried clear in that strange air, as if they would echo forever.

“I come in the name of Steven Deschain, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Gabrielle Deschain, she of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Cortland Andrus, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Cuthbert Allgood, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Alain Johns, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Jamie DeCurry, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Vannay the Wise, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Hax the Cook, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of David the hawk, he of Gilead and the sky!

“I come in the name of Susan Delgado, she of Mejis!

“I come in the name of Sheemie Ruiz, he of Mejis!

“I come in the name of Pere Callahan, he of Jerusalem’s Lot, and the roads!

“I come in the name of Ted Brautigan, he of America!

“I come in the name of Dinky Earnshaw, he of America!

“I come in the name of Aunt Talitha, she of River Crossing, and will lay her cross here, as I was bid!

“I come in the name of Stephen King, he of Maine!

“I come in the name of Oy, the brave, he of Mid-World!

“I come in the name of Eddie Dean, he of New York!

“I come in the name of Susannah Dean, she of New York!

“I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of New York, whom I call my own true son!

“I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as myself; you will open to me.”

After that came the sound of a horn. It simultaneously chilled Patrick’s blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into silence. Then, perhaps a minute later, came a great, echoing boom: the sound of a door swinging shut forever.

And after that came silence.

THIRTEEN

Patrick sat where he was at the base of the pyramid, shivering, until Old Star and Old Mother rose in the sky. The song of the roses and the Tower hadn’t ceased, but it had grown low and sleepy, little more than a murmur.

At last he went back to the road, gathered as many whole cans as he could (there was a surprising number of them, considering the force of the explosion that had demolished the cart), and found a deerskin sack that would hold them. He realized he had forgotten his pencil and went back to get it.

Beside the pencil, gleaming in the starlight, was Roland’s watch.

The boy took it with a small (and nervous) hoot of glee. He put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the road and slung his little sack of gunna over his shoulder.

I can tell you that he walked until nearly midnight, and that he looked at the watch before taking his rest. I can tell you that the watch had stopped completely. I can tell you that, come noon of the following day, he looked at it again and saw that it had begun to run in the correct direction once more, albeit very slowly. But of Patrick I can tell you no more, not whether he made it back to the Federal, not whether he found Stuttering Bill that was, not whether he eventually came once more to America-side. I can tell you none of these things, say sorry. Here the darkness hides him from my storyteller’s eye and he must go on alone.