Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  She knew exactly what he meant. The wind had kicked up fierce in the night, and when it screamed around the eaves of the hotel and the saloon next door, it had sounded to Susannah like the screams of children—wee ones so lost in time and space they would never find their way home.

  “All right, but Roland—before we cross the street and go into that Dogan, I want your promise on one thing.”

  “What promise would you have?”

  “If something looks like getting us—some monster out of the Devil’s Arse or one from the todash between-lands—you put a bullet in my head before it happens. When it comes to yourself you can do whatever you want, but … what? What are you holding that out for?” It was one of his revolvers.

  “Because I’m only really good with one of them these days. And because I won’t be the one to take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however—”

  “Roland, your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me,” she said. Then she took the gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. “As for that thing, if you think I’m gonna ride in it before I have to, you’re crazy.”

  A faint smile touched his lips. “It’s better when it’s the two of us, isn’t it?”

  She sighed, then nodded. “A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let’s blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses.”

  FIVE

  He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs, Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap. At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the bottom.

  “That’s the end of that,” she said when the echoes had finally ceased. “You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it’s going to do me now.”

  “We’ll see,” Roland said, starting down. “You might be surprised.”

  “That thing ain’t gonna work fo’ shit an we bofe know it,” Detta said. Oy uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That’s right.

  SIX

  The chair did survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they’d come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.

  “There, now, dint I tell you?” she asked, and cackled. “Reckon it’s time to start totin dat barge, Roland!”

  He eyed her. “Can you make Detta go away?”

  She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said. She flushed. “Yes,” she said in a remarkably small voice. “Say sorry, Roland.”

  He picked her up and got her settled into the harness. Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan—as creepy as it was beneath the Dogan—Susannah was glad that they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn’t think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower.

  The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her way to Roland’s obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn’t todash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag.

  Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?

  SEVEN

  They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.

  Under the main message they had signed their names: Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted’s, and reading them made her feel like crying:

  “God love em,” Susannah said hoarsely. “May God love and keep em all.”

  “Keep-um,” said a small and rather timid voice from Roland’s heel. They looked down.

  “Decided to talk again, sugarpie?” Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.

  EIGHT

  Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and passages—some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and more menacing—and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her. (“Although not one single change of clothes,” Susannah said with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that looked to Roland like the ones he’d found on the beach, they heard an unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.

  “Do you know what that says?” she asked. Roland—although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more—shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you’d want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you be able to?

  Maybe not.

  Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. “I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now,” she said, and pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. “Look, there’s our tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We’re almost there now, Roland, promise you.”

  But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.

  “I don’t know—” Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say, Is this what you wanted?

  “Yeah,” she said, obviously relieved. “Okay. Look, just like I told you.” She pointed to a door marked FORD’S THEATER, 1865 SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. “What we want’s just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right—I think. Anyway, I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already
thinking of as “the world above.” If so, they were in trouble.

  It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a little engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger’s left heel. There was no dust on the floor, and the tracks they’d seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a little scream.

  “Steady-oh,” Roland said. “It can’t break through. None of them can break through.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes,” said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn’t sure at all. A phrase of Eddie’s occurred to him: All bets are off.

  They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones that were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breath until they were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.

  Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. “I don’t know, Roland,” she said, and he could hear her struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this … this here …” Her voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breath, struggling to get herself under control. “This all looks different. And the sounds … how they get in your head …”

  He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door that had settled crookedly against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a sound that was both horrible and fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of stinking air. Roland had an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still could, maybe rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said, “Let’s see what’s up there. It’s a little brighter, anyway.”

  As they neared an intersection from which passages and tiled corridors rayed off in all directions, he felt her shift against him, sitting up. “There!” she shouted. “That pile of rubble! We walked around that! We walked around that, Roland, I remember!”

  Part of the ceiling had fallen into the middle of the intersection, creating a jumble of broken tiles, smashed glass, snags of wire, and plain old dirt. Along the edge of it were tracks.

  “Down there!” she cried. “Straight ahead! Ted said, ‘I think this is the one they called Main Street’ and Dinky said he thought so, too. Dani Rostov said that a long time ago, around the time the Crimson King did whatever it was that darkened Thunderclap, a whole bunch of people used that way to get out. Only they left some of their thoughts behind. I asked her what feeling that was like and she said it was a little like seeing dirty soap-scum on the sides of the tub after you let out the water. ‘Not nice,’ she said. Fred marked it and then we went all the way back up to the infirmary. I don’t want to brag and queer the deal, but I think we’re gonna be okay.”

  And they were, at least for the time being. Eighty paces beyond the pile of rubble they came upon an arched opening. Beyond it, flickering white balls of radiance hung down from the ceiling, leading off at a downward-sloping angle. On the wall, in four chalkstrokes that had already started to run because of the moisture seeping through the tiles, was the last message left for them by the liberated Breakers:

  They rested here for awhile, eating handfuls of raisins from a vacuum-sealed can. Even Oy nibbled a few, although it was clear from the way he did it that he didn’t care for them much. When they’d all eaten their fill and Roland had once more stored the can in the leather sack he’d found along the way, he asked her: “Are you ready to go on?”

  “Yes. Right away, I think, before I lose my—my God, Roland, what was that?”

  From behind them, probably from one of the passages leading away from the rubble-choked intersection, had come a low thudding sound. It had a liquid quality to it, as if a giant in water-filled rubber boots had just taken a single step.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Susannah was looking uneasily back over her shoulder but could see only shadows. Some of them were moving, but that could have been because some of the lights were flickering.

  Could have been.

  “You know,” she said, “I think it might be a good idea if we vacated this area just about as fast as we can.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said, resting on one knee and the splayed tips of his fingers, like a runner getting ready to burst from the blocks. When she was back in the harness, he got to his feet and moved past the arrow on the wall, setting a pace that was just short of a jog.

  NINE

  They had been moving at that near-jog for about fifteen minutes when they came upon a skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if welcoming them to the underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing’s naked pelvis was a ring that had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man’s right hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up and handed it to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had thought, then cast it aside. It made a little clink and then there were only the sounds of dripping water and the todash chimes, fainter now but persistent.

  “What I thought,” she said.

  “And what was that?” he asked, moving on again.

  “The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring.”

  “An elk? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a fraternal order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand.” And she laughed, a trifle wildly.

  The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that pulsed with a rhythmic but not quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was something there to get, and after a little while she got it. While Roland was hurrying, the pulse of the guide-lights was rapid. When he slowed down (never stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the globes also slowed down. She didn’t think they were responding to his heartbeat, exactly, or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the term biorhythm, she would have seized upon it.) Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at any given time, Main Street was dark. Then, one by one, the lights would come on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She turned to look back—only once, she didn’t want to throw him off his stride— and saw that, yes, the lights were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost everything else in this world) starting to give out. Then she noticed that one of the globes they were approaching remained dark. As they neared and then passed under it, she saw that it wasn’t completely dead; a dim core of illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their bodies and brains. It reminded her of how you’d sometimes see a neon sign with one or more letters on the fritz, turning PABST into PA ST or TASTY BRATWURST into TASTY RATWURST. A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out bulb, then another, then two in a row.

  “Chances are good we’re gonna be in the dark before long,” she said glumly.

  “I know,” Roland said. He was starting to sound the teensiest bit out of breath.

  The air was still dank, and a chill was gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on the walls, most rotted far beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she saw one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man’s belly while the crowd went nuts. There was one line of copy in half a dozen different languages. English was second from the top. VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS! YOU WILL CHEER! it said.

&
nbsp; “Christ, Roland,” Susannah said. “Christ almighty, what were they?”

  Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they were folken who had run mad.

  TEN

  At hundred-yard intervals, little flights of stairs—the longest was only ten risers from top to bottom—took them gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they’d gone what Susannah estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more skeletons, so many that Roland had to tread upon some in order to pass. They did not crunch but made a damp puttering sound that was somehow worse. The smell that arose from them was sallow and wet. Most of the tiles had been torn away above these bodies, and those that were still on the walls had been pocked with bullet-holes. A firefight, then. Susannah opened her mouth to say something about it, but before she could, that low thudding sound came again. She thought it was a little louder this time. A little closer. She looked behind her again and saw nothing. The lights fifty yards back were still going dark in a line.

  “I don’t like to sound paranoid, Roland, but I think we are being followed.”

  “I know we are.”

  “You want me to throw a shot at it? Or a plate? That whistling can be pretty spooky.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It may not know what we are. If you shoot … it will.”

  It took her a moment to realize what he was really saying: he wasn’t sure bullets—or an Oriza—would stop whatever was back there. Or, worse, perhaps he was sure.

  When she spoke again, she worked very hard to sound calm, and thought she succeeded tolerably well. “It’s something from that crack in the earth, do you think?”

  “It might be,” Roland said. “Or it might be something that got through from todash space. Now hush.”

  The gunslinger went on more quickly, finally reaching jogging pace and then passing it. She was amazed by his mobility now that the pain that had troubled his hip was gone, but she could hear his breathing as well as feel it in the rise and fall of his back—quick, gasping intakes followed by rough expulsions that sounded almost like cries of annoyance. She would have given anything to be running beside him on her own legs, the strong ones Jack Mort had stolen from her.