by Stephen King
“What I think,” he said, “is that women need a reason to have sex.” Joe put one foot on Roland’s chest —like a big-game hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. “Men, on the other hand, only need a place! Bing!” He popped his eyes. “The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a—”
He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-ZBoy in order to gain the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joe’s head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating.
Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth—perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn’t the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing: darkening, contracting, turning into something that was no longer human. It was the face of a psychotic clown.
“You,” he said, but before he could say anything else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the thing’s ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abruptly when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily.
Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out. Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo’s shadow fell over them.
“You bitch, I’ll teach you to interrupt a man when he’s on a—”
“Roland, let it go!” she screamed, and he did.
Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasn’t his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface things—not features at all but markings on some animal’s hide or an insect’s carapace.
“Stop!” he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicada’s buzz. “I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!”
“Heard it,” she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye.
TWO
Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were foodstains on the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn’t want to know, as long as it didn’t make her sick. As long as it wasn’t poisonous.
Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo’s glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostat—a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartment—was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and filled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.
The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages—almost arms and legs—sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse than Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.
The tidy, well-lit cottage—like something out of a fairytale, and hadn’t she seen that from the first?—was now a dim and smoky peasant’s hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.
“Roland, are you all right?”
Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still.
“Gunslinger, I was ’mazed,” Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. “I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon.”
“Roland, no! Git up!” That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought, It’s a wonder I didn’t say “Git up, honky,” and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.
“Give me pardon, first,” Roland said, not looking at her.
She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn’t stand to see him on his knees like that. “Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart.” She paused, then added: “If I save your life another nine times, we’ll be somewhere close to even.”
He said, “Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,” and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close little hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.
“What he fed us was all right,” he said. It was as if he’d read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. “He’d never poison what he meant to … eat.”
She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut’s door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the little entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a little less like a sauna.
“How did you know?” he asked.
She thought back to the hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen. Later on, after they’d left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and
(dad-a-chee)
a key. Jake’s name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she’d found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both.
According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza–Park Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King.
“Come with me,” she said. “Into the bathroom.”
THREE
Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked li
ke it had last been used …
Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used. The shower-head was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that she hadn’t cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime: ODD LANE, and, below that, DANDELO.
“It’s an anagram,” she said. “Do you see?”
He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed.
“Not your fault, Roland. They’re our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it, it’s an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don’t know if it was Dandelo’s idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King.”
“You figured it out,” he said. “I was busy laughing myself to death.”
“We both would have done that,” she said. “You were just a little more vulnerable because your sense of humor … forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, it’s pretty lame.”
“I know that,” he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room.
A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. “Roland, is he still …?”
He nodded, smiling a little. “Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure.”
“I’m glad,” she said simply.
“Oy’s standing guard. If anything were to happen, I’m sure he’d let us know.” He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine cabinet. “‘I’ve left you something.’ Do you know what?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to look.”
“Where is this medicine cabinet?”
She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to Susannah like the world’s oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops. There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:
“Childe?” she asked. “Does that mean anything to you?”
He nodded. “It’s a term that describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven’t thought of myself so in many years.”
“Yet you are Childe Roland?”
“Perhaps once I was. We’re beyond such things now. Beyond ka.”
“But still on the Path of the Beam.”
“Aye.” He traced the last line on the envelope: All debts are paid. “Open it, Susannah, for I’d see what’s inside.”
She did.
FOUR
It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet’s name in his half-script, half-printing above the title. Susannah had read some of Browning’s dramatic monologues in college, but she wasn’t familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic (a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. Someone—King, presumably—had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI.
“Read the marked ones,” he said hoarsely, “because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well.”
“Stanza the First,” she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture.
“My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.”
“Collins,” Roland said. “Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our ka-tet in his stories! ‘He lied in every word!’ Aye, so he did!”
“Not Collins,” she said. “Dandelo.”
Roland nodded. “Dandelo, say true. Go on.”
“Okay; Stanza the Second.
“What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare.”
“Does thee remember his stick, and how he waved it?” Roland asked her.
Of course she did. And the thoroughfare had been snowy instead of dusty, but otherwise it was the same. Otherwise it was a description of what had just happened to them. The idea made her shiver.
“Was this poet of your time?” Roland asked. “Your when?”
She shook her head. “Not even of my country. He died at least sixty years before my when.”
“Yet he must have seen what just passed. A version of it, anyway.”
“Yes. And Stephen King knew the poem.” She had a sudden intuition, one that blazed too bright to be anything but the truth. She looked at Roland with wild, startled eyes. “It was this poem that got King going! It was his inspiration!”
“Do you say so, Susannah?”
“Yes!”
“Yet this Browning must have seen us.”
She didn’t know. It was too confusing. Like trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or being lost in a hall of mirrors. Her head was swimming.
“Read the next one marked, Susannah! Read ex-eye-eyeeye.”
“That’s Stanza Thirteen,” she said.
“As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there;
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!
“Now Stanza the Fourteenth I read thee.
“Alive? He might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”
“Lippy,” the gunslinger said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Yonder’s pluggit, colloped neck and all, only female instead of male.”
She made no reply—needed to make none. Of course it was Lippy: blind and bony, her neck rubbed right down to the raw pink in places. Her an ugly old thing, I know, the old man had said … the thing that had looked like an old man. Ye old ki’-box and gammer-gurt, ye lost four-legged leper! And here it was in black and white, a poem written long before sai King was even born, perhaps eighty or even a hundred years before: … as scant as hair/In leprosy.
“Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!” Roland said, smiling grimly. “And while she’ll never stud nor ever did, we’ll see she’s back with the devil before we leave!”
“No,” she said. “We won’t.” Her voice sounded drier than ever. She wanted a drink, but was now afraid to take anything flowing from the taps in this vile place. In a little bit she would get some snow and melt it. Then she would have
her drink, and not before.
“Why do you say so?”
“Because she’s gone. She went out into the storm when we got the best of her master.”
“How does thee know it?”
Susannah shook her head. “I just do.” She shuffled to the next page in the poem, which ran to over two hundred lines. “Stanza the Sixteenth.
“Not it! I fancied …”
She ceased.
“Susannah? Why do you—” Then his eyes fixed on the next word, which he could read even in English letters. “Go on,” he said. His voice was low, the words little more than a whisper.
“Are you positive?”
“Read, for I would hear.”
She cleared her throat. “Stanza the Sixteenth.
“Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place,
That way he used. Alas, one night’s disgrace!
Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.”
“He writes of Mejis,” Roland said. His fists were clenched, although she doubted that he knew it. “He writes of how we fell out over Susan Delgado, for after that it was never the same between us. We mended our friendship as best we could, but no, it was never quite the same.”
“After the woman comes to the man or the man to the woman, I don’t think it ever is,” she said, and handed him the photocopied sheets. “Take this. I’ve read all the ones he mentioned. If there’s stuff in the rest about coming to the Dark Tower—or not—puzzle it out by yourself. You can do it if you try hard enough, I reckon. As for me, I don’t want to know.”
Roland, it seemed, did. He shuffled through the pages, looking for the last one. The pages weren’t numbered, but he found the end easily enough by the white space beneath that stanza marked XXXIV. Before he could read, however, that thin cry came again. This time the wind was in a complete lull and there was no doubt about where it came from.