by Stephen King
“Lie down, Susannah,” he said. “Take your rest. I’ll watch until midnight, then wake you.”
“So now we keep a watch,” she said.
He nodded.
“Is he watching us?”
Roland wasn’t sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for he’d have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of their companionship, as well. Half-mother and White Father, with their backs turned to him.
“It’s likely,” he said.
She started to lie down, then stopped. She touched the sore beside her mouth. “This isn’t a pimple, Roland.”
“No?” He sat quiet, watching her.
“I had a friend in college who got one just like it,” Susannah said. “It’d bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor—a special kind we call a dermatologist — and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its roots in a little deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too.”
Roland was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor. He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself. Mordred, as well.
“We don’t have no novocaine, Baby-Boots,” Detta Walker said, “and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell you, you goan whip out yo’ knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off’n me. Goan do it faster than yon bum’blah c’n snatch a fly out de air. You unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?”
“Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest.”
She lay over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened her eyes and gave him
(I watchin you, white boy)
a glare. Roland nodded to her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes closed, they didn’t open again.
He had promised to wake her at midnight, but let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch said was one o’ the clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around him and his head in his arms.
And does his mouth, still caked with sai Thoughtful’s blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but once, the milk it never tasted?
Roland didn’t know. Didn’t particularly want to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly stone.
Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento’s artificial sun and those he’d seen in Stephen King’s world. That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland’s hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.
CHAPTER IV:
HIDES
ONE
They had to go fireless three nights instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of Susannah’s life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you’d be lying from then on? Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?
Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse. She came to dread every light breath of breeze from the snowlands to the east and south. It was both terrible and oddly humbling to realize how easily physical discomfort could take control, expanding like poison gas until it owned all the floor-space, took over the entire playing field. Grief? Loss? What were those things when you could feel cold on the march, moving in from your fingers and toes, crawling up your motherfucking nose, and moving where? Toward the brain, do it please ya. And toward the heart. In the grip of cold like that, grief and loss were nothing but words. No, not even that. Only sounds. So much meaningless quack as you sat shuddering under the stars, waiting for a morning that would never come.
What made it worse was knowing there were potential bonfires all around them, for they’d reached the live region Roland called “the undersnow.” This was a series of long, grassy slopes (most of the grass now white and dead) and shallow valleys where there were isolated stands of trees, and brooks now plugged with ice. Earlier, in daylight, Roland had pointed out several holes in the ice and told her they’d been made by deer. He pointed out several piles of scat, as well. In daylight such sign had been interesting, even hopeful. But in this endless ditch of night, listening to the steady low click of her chattering teeth, it meant nothing. Eddie meant nothing. Jake, neither. The Dark Tower meant nothing, nor did the bonfire they’d had out the outskirts of Castle-town. She could remember the look of it, but the feel of heat warming her skin until it brought an oil of sweat was utterly lost. Like a person who has died for a moment or two and has briefly visited some shining afterlife, she could only say that it had been wonderful.
Roland sat with his arms around her, sometimes voicing a dry, harsh cough. Susannah thought he might be getting sick, but this thought also had no power. Only the cold.
Once—shortly before dawn finally began to stain the sky in the east, this was — she saw orange lights swirl-dancing far ahead, past the place where the snow began. She asked Roland if he had any idea what they were. She had no real interest, but hearing her voice reassured her that she wasn’t dead. Not yet, at least.
“I think they’re hobs.”
“W-What are th-they?” She now stuttered and stammered everything.
“I don’t know how to explain them to you,” he said. “And there’s really no need. You’ll see them in time. Right now if you listen, you’ll hear something closer and more interesting.”
At first she heard only the sigh of the wind. Then it dropped and her ears picked up the dry swish of the grass below as something walked through it. This was followed by a low crunching sound. Susannah knew exactly what it was: a hoof stamping through thin ice, opening the running water to the cold world above. She also knew that in three or four days’ time she might be wearing a coat made from the animal that was now drinking nearby, but this also had no meaning. Time was a useless concept when you were sitting awake in the dark, and in constant pain.
Had she thought she had been cold before? That was quite funny, wasn’t it?
“What about Mordred?” she asked. “Is he out there, do you think?”
“Yes.”
“And does he feel the cold like we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t stand much more of this, Roland—I really can’t.”
“You won’t have to. It’ll be dawn soon, and I expect we’ll have a fire tomorrow come dark.” He coughed into his fist, then put his arm back around her. “You’ll feel better once we’re up and in the doings. Meantime, at least we’re together.”
&nb
sp; TWO
Mordred was as cold as they were, every bit, and he had no one.
He was close enough to hear them, though: not the actual words, but the sound of their voices. He shuddered uncontrollably, and had lined his mouth with dead grass when he became afraid that Roland’s sharp ears might pick up the sound of his chattering teeth. The railwayman’s jacket was no help; he had thrown it away when it had fallen into so many pieces that he could no longer hold it together. He’d worn the arms of it out of Castle-town, but then they had fallen to pieces as well, starting at the elbows, and he’d cast them into the low grass beside the old road with a petulant curse. He was only able to go on wearing the boots because he’d been able to weave long grass into a rough twine. With it he’d bound what remained of them to his feet.
He’d considered changing back to his spider-form, knowing that body would feel the cold less, but his entire short life had been plagued by the specter of starvation, and he supposed that part of him would always fear it, no matter how much food he had at hand. The gods knew there wasn’t much now; three severed arms, four legs (two partially eaten), and a piece of a torso from the wicker basket, that was all. If he changed, the spider would gobble that little bit up by daylight. And while there was game out here—he heard the deer moving around just as clearly as his White Daddy did—Mordred wasn’t entirely confident of his ability to trap it, or run it down.
So he sat and shivered and listened to the sound of their voices until the voices ceased. Maybe they slept. He might have dozed a little, himself. And the only thing that kept him from giving up and going back was his hatred of them. That they should have each other when he had no one. No one at all.
Mordred’s a-hungry, he thought miserably. Mordred’s a-cold. And Mordred has no one. Mordred’s alone.
He slipped his wrist into his mouth, bit deep, and sucked the warmth that flowed out. In the blood he tasted the last of Rando Thoughtful’s life … but so little! So soon gone! And once it was, there was nothing but the useless, recycled taste of himself.
In the dark, Mordred began to cry.
THREE
Four hours after dawn, under a white sky that promised rain or sleet (perhaps both at the same time), Susannah Dean lay shivering behind a fallen log, looking down into one of the little valleys. You’ll hear Oy, the gunslinger had told her. And you’ll hear me, too. I’ll do what I can, but I’ll be driving them ahead of me and you’ll have the best shooting. Make every shot count.
What made things worse was her creeping intuition that Mordred was very close now, and he might try to bushwhack her while her back was turned. She kept looking around, but they had picked a relatively clear spot, and the open grass behind her was empty each time save once, when she had seen a large brown rabbit lolloping along with its ears dragging the ground.
At last she heard Oy’s highpitched barking from the copse of trees on her left. A moment later, Roland began to yell. “H’yah! H’yah! Get on brisk! Get on brisk, I tell thee! Never tarry! Never tarry a single—” Then the sound of him coughing. She didn’t like that cough. No, not at all.
Now she could see movement in the trees, and for one of the few times since Roland had forced her to admit there was another person hiding inside of her, she called on Detta Walker.
I need you. If you want to be warm again, you settle my hands so I can shoot straight.
And the ceaseless shivering of her body stopped. As the herd of deer burst out of the trees—not a small herd, either; there had to be at least eighteen of them, led by a buck with a magnificent rack—her hands also stopped their shaking. In the right one she held Roland’s revolver with the sandalwood grips.
Here came Oy, bursting out of the woods behind the final straggler. This was a mutie doe, running (and with eerie grace) on four legs of varying sizes with a fifth waggling bonelessly from the middle of her belly like a teat. Last of all came Roland, not really running at all, not anymore, but rather staggering onward at a grim jog. She ignored him, tracking the buck with the gun as the big fellow ran across her field of fire.
“This way,” she whispered. “Break to your right, honey-child, let’s see you do it. Commala-come-come.”
And while there was no reason why he should have, the buck leading his little fleeing herd did indeed veer slightly in Susannah’s direction. Now she was filled with the sort of coldness she welcomed. Her vision seemed to sharpen until she could see the muscles rippling under the buck’s hide, the white crescent as his eye rolled, the old wound on the nearest doe’s foreleg, where the fur had never grown back. She had a moment to wish Eddie and Jake were lying on either side of her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she was seeing, and then that was gone, too.
I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
“I kill with my heart,” she murmured, and began shooting.
The first bullet took the lead buck in the head and he crashed over on his left side. The others ran past him. A doe leaped over his body and Susannah’s second bullet took her at the height of her leap, so that she crashed down dead on the other side, one leg splayed and broken, all grace gone.
She heard Roland fire three times, but didn’t look to see how he’d done; she had her own business to attend to, and she attended to it well. Each of the last four bullets in the cylinder took down a deer, and only one was still moving when he fell. It didn’t occur to her that this was an amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger, after all, and shooting was her business.
Besides, the morning was windless.
Half the herd now lay dead in the grassy valley below. All the remainder save one wheeled left and pelted away downslope toward the stream. A moment later they were lost in a screen of willows. The last one, a yearling buck, ran directly toward her. Susannah didn’t bother trying to reload from the little pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of buckskin but took one of the ’Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding the dull gripping-place.
“’Riza!” she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing buck at mid-neck. Droplets of blood flew in a garland around its head, black against the white sky. A butcher’s cleaver could not have done a neater job. For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless, blood jetting from the stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats. Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red.
The previous night’s long misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands and her feet. There was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder and blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world’s sweetest perfume.
Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms, Roland’s pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.
FOUR
Roland had insisted that they eat a huge breakfast, and her protests that cold corned beef tasted like so much lumpy mush cut zero ice with him. By two that afternoon according to his fancy-schmancy pocket-watch — right around the time the steady cold rain fattened into an icy drizzle, in other words—she was glad. She had never done a harder day of physical labor, and the day wasn’t finished. Roland was by her all the while, matching her in spite of his worsening cough. She had time (during their brief but crazily delicious noon meal of seared deer-steaks) to consider how strange he was, how remarkable. After all this time and all these adventures, she had still not seen the bottom of him. Not even close. She had seen him laughing and crying, killing and dancing, she’d seen him sleeping and on the squat behind a screen of bushes with his pants down and his ass hung over what he called the
Log of Ease. She’d never slept with him as a woman does with a man, but she thought she’d seen him in every other circumstance, and … no. Still no bottom.
“That cough’s sounding more and more like pneumonia to me,” Susannah remarked, not long after the rain had started. They were then in the part of the day’s activities Roland called aven-car: carrying the kill and preparing to make it into something else.
“Never let it worry you,” Roland said. “I have what I need here to cure it.”
“Say true?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yar. And these, which I never lost.” He reached into his pocket and showed her a handful of aspirin tablets. She thought the expression on his face was one of real reverence, and why not? It might be that he owed his life to what he called astin. Astin and cheflet.
They loaded their kill into the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and dragged it down to the stream. It took three trips in all. After they’d stacked the carcasses, Roland carefully placed the head of the yearling buck atop the pile, where it looked at them from its glazed eyes.
“What you want that for?” Susannah asked, with a trace of Detta in her voice.
“We’re going to need all the brains we can get,” Roland said, and coughed dryly into his curled fist again. “It’s a dirty way to do the job, but it’s quick, and it works.”
FIVE
When they had their kill piled beside the icy stream (“At least we don’t have the flies to worry about,” Roland said), the gunslinger began gathering deadwood. Susannah looked forward to the fire, but her terrible need of the previous night had departed. She had been working hard, and for the time being, at least, was warm enough to suit her. She tried to remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept into her bones, turning them to glass, and couldn’t do it. Because the body had a way of forgetting the worst things, she supposed, and without the body’s cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded snapshots.