by Stephen King
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 wanthxm 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 whisding sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on die bottom of die plate, the attachment diat looked so much like Patrick’s pencil sharpener. She diought 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 die 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 die great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breadi 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 die yellow barrel against his palm and shading widi die tip. She could almost smell die dust boiling up from die herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Akhough 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 litde 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 everstrengthening 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.
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 trvith.
“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 setded 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 exacdy 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 rub
ber 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.