by Stephen King
The old man raised his right hand to her, palm out, and Susannah saw there were open sores even there. “I swear it on the name of Andrew John Cornwell, of Tioga Springs, New York. And on his face, too. The King of this castle really did run mad, and really did burst those Wizard’s Glasses that had come into his hands. He really did force the staff to take poison and he really did watch them die.” He flung out the hand he’d held up in pledge to the box of severed limbs. “Where do you think I got those, Lady Blackbird? Body Parts R Us?”
She didn’t understand the reference, and remained still.
“He really has gone on to the Dark Tower. He’s like the dog in some old fable or other, wanting to make sure that if he can’t get any good from the hay, no one else will, either. I didn’t even lie to you about what was in these boxes, not really. I simply showed you the goods and let you draw your own conclusions.” His smile of cynical pleasure made Susannah wonder if she ought to remind him that Roland, at least, had seen through this trick. She decided it wasn’t worth it.
“I told you only one outright lie,” said the former Austin Cornwell. “That he’d had me beheaded.”
“Are you satisfied, Susannah?” Roland asked her.
“Yes,” she said, although she wasn’t; not really. “Let’s go.”
“Climb up in Ho Fat, then, and don’t turn thy back on him when thee does. He’s sly.”
“Tell me about it,” Susannah said, and then did as she was asked.
“Long days and pleasant nights,” said the former sai Cornwell from where he sat amid the squirming, dying snakes. “May the Man Jesus watch over you and all your clan-fam. And may you show sense before it’s too late for sense and stay away from the Dark Tower!”
SIX
They retraced their path to the intersection where they had turned away from the Path of the Beam to go to the Crimson King’s castle, and here Roland stopped to rest for a few minutes. A little bit of a breeze had gotten up, and the patriotic bunting flapped. She saw it now looked old and faded. The pictures of Nixon, Lodge, Kennedy, and Johnson had been defaced by graffiti which was itself ancient. All the glammer—such ragged glammer as the Crimson King had been able to manage, at any rate—was gone.
Masks off, masks off, she thought tiredly. It was a wonderful party, but now it’s finished … and the Red Death holds sway over all.
She touched the pimple beside her mouth, then looked at the tip of her finger. She expected to see blood or pus or both. There was neither, and that was a relief.
“How much of it do you believe?” Susannah asked him.
“Pretty much all of it,” Roland replied.
“So he’s up there. In the Tower.”
“Not in it. Trapped outside it.” He smiled. “There’s a big difference.”
“Is there really? And what will you do to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think that if he did get control of your guns, that he could get back inside the Tower and climb to the top?”
“Yes.” The reply was immediate.
“What will you do about it?”
“Not let him get either of them.” He spoke as if this should have been self-evident, and Susannah supposed it should have been. What she had a way of forgetting was how goddamned literal he was. About everything.
“You were thinking of trapping Mordred, back at the castle.”
“Yes,” Roland agreed, “but given what we found there— and what we were told—it seemed better to move on. Simpler. Look.”
He took out the watch and snapped open the lid. They both observed the second-hand racing its solitary course. But at the same speed as before? Susannah didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think so. She looked up at Roland with her eyebrows raised.
“Most of the time it’s still right,” Roland said, “but no longer all of the time. I think that it’s losing at least a second every sixth or seventh revolution. Perhaps three to six minutes a day, all told.”
“That’s not very much.”
“No,” Roland admitted, putting the watch away, “but it’s a start. Let Mordred do as he will. The Dark Tower lies close beyond the white lands, and I mean to reach it.”
Susannah could understand his eagerness. She only hoped it wouldn’t make him careless. If it did, Mordred Deschain’s youth might no longer matter. If Roland made the right mistake at the wrong moment, she, he, and Oy might never see the Dark Tower at all.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a great fluttering from behind them. Not quite lost within it came a human sound that began as a howl and quickly rose to a shriek. Although distance diminished that cry, the horror and pain in it were all too clear. At last, mercifully, it faded.
“The Crimson King’s Minister of State has entered the clearing,” Roland said.
Susannah looked back toward the castle. She could see its blackish-red ramparts, but nothing else. She was glad she could see nothing else.
Mordred’s a-hungry, she thought. Her heart was beating fast and she thought she had never been so frightened in her whole life—not lying next to Mia as she gave birth, not even in the blackness under Castle Discordia.
Mordred’s a-hungry … but now he’ll be fed.
SEVEN
The old man who had begun life as Austin Cornwell and who would end it as Rando Thoughtful sat at the castle end of the bridge. The rooks waited above him, perhaps sensing that the day’s excitement was not yet done. Thoughtful was warm enough thanks to the pea-coat he was wearing, and he had helped himself to a mouthful of brandy before leaving to meet Roland and his blackbird ladyfriend. Well … perhaps that wasn’t quite true. Perhaps it was Brass and Compson (also known as Feemalo and Fumalo) who’d had the mouthfuls of the King’s best brandy, and Los’s ex-Minister of State who had polished off the last third of the bottle.
Whatever the cause, the old man fell asleep, and the coming of Mordred Red-Heel didn’t wake him. He sat with his chin on his chest and drool trickling from between his pursed lips, looking like a baby who has fallen asleep in his highchair. The birds on the parapets and walkways were gathered more thickly than ever. Surely they would have flown at the approach of the young Prince, but he looked up at them and made a gesture in the air: the open right hand waved brusquely across the face, then curled into a fist and pulled downward. Wait, it said.
Mordred stopped on the town side of the bridge, sniffing delicately at the decayed meat. That smell had been charming enough to bring him here even though he knew Roland and Susannah had continued along the Path of the Beam. Let them and their pet bumbler get fairly back on their way, was the boy’s thinking. This wasn’t the time to close the gap. Later, perhaps. Later his White Daddy would let down his guard, if only for a moment, and then Mordred would have him.
For dinner, he hoped, but lunch or breakfast would do almost as well.
When we last saw this fellow, he was only
(baby-bunting baby-dear baby bring your berries here)
an infant. The creature standing beyond the gates of the Crimson King’s castle had grown into a boy who looked about nine years old. Not a handsome boy; not the sort anyone (except for his lunatic mother) would have called comely. This had less to do with his complicated genetic inheritance than with plain starvation. The face beneath the dry spall of black hair was haggard and far too thin. The flesh beneath Mordred’s blue bombardier’s eyes was a discolored, pouchy purple. His complexion was a birdshot blast of sores and blemishes. These, like the pimple beside Susannah’s mouth, could have been the result of his journey through the poisoned lands, but surely Mordred’s diet had something to do with it. He could have stocked up on canned goods before setting out from the checkpoint beyond the tunnel’s mouth—Roland and Susannah had left plenty behind—but he hadn’t thought to do so. He was, as Roland knew, still learning the tricks of survival. The only thing Mordred had taken from the checkpoint Quonset was a rotting railwayman’s pillowtick jacket and a pair of serviceable boots. Finding the boot
s was good fortune indeed, although they had mostly fallen apart as the trek continued.
Had he been a hume — or even a more ordinary were-creature, for that matter—Mordred would have died in the Badlands, coat or no coat, boots or no boots. Because he was what he was, he had called the rooks to him when he was hungry, and the rooks had no choice but to come. The birds made nasty eating and the bugs he summoned from beneath the parched (and still faintly radioactive) rocks were even worse, but he had choked them down. One day he had touched the mind of a weasel and bade it come. It had been a scrawny, wretched thing, on the edge of starvation itself, but it tasted like the world’s finest steak after the birds and the bugs. Mordred had changed into his other self and gathered the weasel into his seven-legged embrace, sucking and eating until there was nothing left but a torn piece of fur. He would have gladly eaten another dozen, but that had been the only one.
And now there was a whole basket of food set before him. It was well-aged, true, but what of that? Even the maggots would provide nourishment. More than enough to carry him into the snowy woods southeast of the castle, which would be teeming with game.
But before them, there was the old man.
“Rando,” he said. “Rando Thoughtful.”
The old man jerked and mumbled and opened his eyes. For a moment he looked at the scrawny boy standing before him with a total lack of understanding. Then his rheumy eyes filled with fright.
“Mordred, son of Los’,” he said, trying a smile. “Hile to you, King that will be!” He made a shuffling gesture with his legs, then seemed to realize that he was sitting down and it wouldn’t do. He attempted to find his feet, fell back with a bump that amused the boy (amusement had been hard to come by in the Badlands, and he welcomed it), then tried again. This time he managed to get up.
“I see no bodies except for those of two fellows who look like they died even older than you,” Mordred remarked, looking around in exaggerated fashion. “I certainly see no dead gunslingers, of either the long-leg or shor’-leg variety.”
“You say true—and I say thankya, o’course I do—but I can explain that, sai, and quite easily—”
“Oh, but wait! Hold thy explanation, excellent though I’m sure it is! Let me guess, instead! Is it that the snakes have bound the gunslinger and his lady, long fat snakes, and you’ve had them removed into yonder castle for safekeeping?”
“My lord—”
“If so,” Mordred continued, “there must have been an almighty lot of snakes in thy basket, for I still see many out here. Some appear to be dining on what should have been my supper.” Although the severed, rotting limbs in the basket would still be his supper—part of it, anyway—Mordred gave the old fellow a reproachful look. “Have the gunslingers been put away, then?”
The old man’s look of fright departed and was replaced by one of resignation. Mordred found this downright infuriating. What he wanted to see in old sai Thoughtful’s face was not fright, and certainly not resignation, but hope. Which Mordred would snatch away at his leisure. His shape wavered. For a moment the old man saw the unformed blackness which lurked beneath, and the many legs. Then it was gone and the boy was back. For the moment, at least.
May I not die screaming, the former Austin Cornwell thought. At least grant me that much, you gods that be. May I not die screaming in the arms of yonder monstrosity.
“You know what’s happened here, young sai. It’s in my mind, and so it’s in yours. Why not take the mess in that basket—the snakes, too, do ya like em—and leave an old man to what little life he has left? For your father’s sake, if not your own. I served him well, even at the end. I could have simply hunkered in the castle and let them go their course. But I didn’t. I tried.”
“You had no choice,” Mordred replied from his end of the bridge. Not knowing if it was true or not. Nor caring. Dead flesh was only nourishment. Living flesh and blood still rich with the air of a man’s last breath …ah, that was something else. That was fine dining! “Did he leave me a message?”
“Aye, you know he did.”
“Tell me.”
“Why don’t you just pick it out of my mind?”
Again there came that fluttering, momentary change. For a moment it was neither a boy nor a boy-sized spider standing on the far end of the bridge but something that was both at the same time. Sai Thoughtful’s mouth went dry even while the drool that had escaped during his nap still gleamed on his chin. Then the boy-version of Mordred solidified again inside his torn and rotting coat.
“Because it pleases me to hear it from your drooping old stew-hole,” he told Thoughtful.
The old man licked his lips. “All right; may it do ya fine. He said that he’s crafty while you’re young and without so much as a sip of guile. He said that if you don’t stay back where you belong, he’ll have your head off your shoulders. He said he’d like to hold it up to your Red Father as he stands trapped upon his balcony.”
This was quite a bit more than Roland actually said (as we should know, having been there), and more than enough for Mordred.
Yet not enough for Rando Thoughtful. Perhaps only ten days before it would have accomplished the old man’s purpose, which was to goad the boy into killing him quickly. But Mordred had seasoned in a hurry, and now withstood his first impulse to simply bolt across the bridge into the castle courtyard, changing as he charged, and tearing Rando Thoughtful’s head from his body with the swipe of one barbed leg.
Instead he peered up at the rooks—hundreds of them, now—and they peered back at him, as intent as pupils in a classroom. The boy made a fluttering gesture with his arms, then pointed at the old man. The air was at once filled with the rising whir of wings. The King’s Minister turned to flee, but before he’d gotten a single step, the rooks descended on him in an inky cloud. He threw his arms up to protect his face as they lit on his head and shoulders, turning him into a scarecrow. This instinctive gesture did no good; more of them alit on his upraised arms until the very weight of the birds forced them down. Bills nipped and needled at the old man’s face, drawing blood in tiny tattoo stipples.
“No!” Mordred shouted. “Save the skin for me … but you may have his eyes.”
It was then, as the eager rooks tore Rando Thoughtful’s eyes from their living sockets, that the ex-Minister of State uttered the rising howl Roland and Susannah heard as they neared the edge of Castle-town. The birds who couldn’t find a roosting-place hung around him in a living thunderhead. They turned him on his levitating heels and carried him toward the changeling, who had now advanced to the center of the bridge and squatted there. The boots and rotted pillowtick coat had been left behind for the nonce on the town side of the bridge; what waited for sai Thoughtful, reared up on its back legs, forelegs pawing the air, red mark on its hairy belly all too visible, was DanTete, the Little Red King.
The man floated to his fate, shrieking and eyeless. He thrust his hands out in front of him, making warding-off gestures, and the spider’s front legs seized one of them, guided it into the bristling maw of its mouth, and bit it off with a candy-cane crunch.
Sweet!
EIGHT
That night, beyond the last of the oddly narrow, oddly unpleasant townhouses, Roland stopped in front of what had probably been a smallhold farm. He stood facing the ruin of the main building, sniffing.
“What, Roland? What?”
“Can you smell the wood of that place, Susannah?”
She sniffed. “I can, as a matter of fact—what of it?”
He turned to her, smiling. “If we can smell it, we can burn it.”
This turned out to be correct. They had trouble kindling the fire, even aided by Roland’s slyest tricks of trailcraft and half a can of Sterno, but in the end they succeeded. Susannah sat as close to it as she could, turning at regular intervals in order to toast both sides equally, relishing the sweat that popped out first on her face and her breasts, then on her back. She had forgotten what it was to be warm, and went on feeding
wood to the flames until the campfire was a roaring bonfire. To animals in the open lands further along the Path of the healing Beam, that fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object—to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father’s sake—but he didn’t. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.
“Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?” he asked her at last.
She nodded. “If I have to.”
“Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold,” he said. “And while I can’t promise you we’ll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don’t believe it’ll be any longer than two.”
“You think it’ll be easier to take game if we don’t build a fire, don’t you?”
Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.
“Will there be game as early as day after tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
He considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t say—but I do.”
“Can you smell it?”
“No.”
“Touch their minds?”
“It’s not that, either.”
She let it go. “Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?”
He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon’s breath. “They’ll not come close to thy bonfire.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we’ll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can persuade them to go.”
“And how do you know that?”
He shook his head yet again, although he thought he knew the answer to her question. What he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say so.