by Stephen King
Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.
NINE
Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.
“I think it’s likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?”
She remembered very well, and said so.
“It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”
“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.
“No,” Roland said. “He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”
This raised a question in her mind. “We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she said. “How old do you think he is?”
Roland shook his head. “Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest to that.”
“Did Stephen King put him in our way?”
“I can’t say, only that he knew of him, sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?”
She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala! commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’s alone. But she had begun to hope that that didn’t necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her quest.
She had been having her own dreams.
TEN
Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combination truck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow’s operator) would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab’s roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. “‘California Sun’! The Rivieras! Oh, doesn’t it sound fine!”
“If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keep hold of thy plate.”
“You can count on that,” she said.
Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL. This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his head reading YARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn’t think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life.
ELEVEN
The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo’s hut, and although the engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the driver’s seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shiny-headed robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucas’s C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the snowfields:
“HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW? HOW ARE TRICKS IN KUH-KUH-KOKOMO?”
Roland stepped out of the late Lippy’s quarters. “Hile, Bill,” he said mildly. “Long days and pleasant nights.”
The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn’t appear to be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head—twirling and twirling in the bright morning light—and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasy-Japaneezy, Eddie would have said.
“Ah!” said the robot. “A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g—” He raised an arm that had not one elbow-joint but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a little whistling noise—Wheeep!—and then he finished: “A gunslinger!”
Susannah laughed. She couldn’t help it. They had come all this way to meet an oversized electronic version of Porky Pig. T’beya-t’beya-t’beya, that’s all, folks!
“I had heard rumors of such on the l-l-l-land,” the robot said, ignoring her laughter. “Are you Ruh-Ruh-Roland of G-Gilead?”
“So I am,” Roland said. “And you?”
“William, D-746541-M, Maintenance Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me Stuh-huttering B-Bill. I’ve got a f-f-fried sir-hirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuh-fuh-forbade me. And since he’s the only h-human around …or was…” He stopped. Susannah could quite clearly hear the clitter-clack of relays somewhere inside and what she thought of wasn’t C3P0, who she’d of course never seen, but Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.
Then Stuttering Bill quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and bowing … but not to either her or to Roland. He said, “Hile, Patrick D-Danville, son of S-SSonia! It’s good to see you out and in the c-c-clear, so it is!” And Susannah could hear the emotion in Stuttering Bill’s voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay about lowering her plate.
TWELVE
They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been quite willing to go into the hut, for he had but rudimentary olfactory equipment. The humes were better equipped and knew that the hut stank and had not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were both out. In any case, the palaver didn’t take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe Collins as his master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the job. Besides, Collins/Dandelo had the necessary code-words.
“I w-was nuh-not able to g-give him the c-code wuh-wuhhurds when he a-asked,” said Stuttering Bill, “but my p-programming did not pruh-prohibit bringing him cer-hertain m-manuals that had the ih-information he needed.”
“Bureaucracy is so wonderful,” Susannah said.
Bill said he had stayed away from “J-J-Joe” as often (and as long) as he could, although he had to come when Tower Road needed plowing — that was also in his programming — and o
nce a month to bring provisions (canned goods, mostly) from what he called “the Federal.” He also liked to see Patrick, who had once given Bill a wonderful picture of himself that he looked at often (and of which he had made many copies). Yet every time he came, he confided, he was sure he would find Patrick gone—killed and thrown casually into the woods somewhere back toward what Bill called “the Buh-Buh-Bads,” like an old piece of trash. But now here he was, alive and free, and Bill was delighted.
“For I do have r-r-rudimentary em-m-motions,” he said, sounding to Susannah like someone owning up to a bad habit.
“Do you need the code-words from us, in order to accept our orders?” Roland asked.
“Yes, sai,” Stuttering Bill said.
“Shit,” Susannah muttered. They had had similar problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis.
“H-H-However,” said Stuttering Bill, “if you were to c-c-couch your orders as suh-huh-hugestions, I’m sure I’d be huhhuh-huh-huh—” He raised his arm and smacked his head again. The Wheep! sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region of his chest, Susannah thought. “—happy to oblige,” he finished.
“My first suggestion is that you fix that fucking stutter,” Roland said, and then turned around, amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing great, blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was harmless; this time there was no one to steal Patrick’s joy. It belonged only to him. And to those lucky enough to hear it.
THIRTEEN
In the woods beyond the plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called “the Bads,” a shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, half-scraped hides watched the quartet standing in front of Dandelo’s hut. Die, he thought at them. Die, why don’t you all do me a favor and just die? But they didn’t die, and the cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives.
Later, after they had all piled into the cab of Bill’s plow and driven away, Mordred crept down to the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the cans in Dandelo’s pantry—and eating something else as well, something he would live to regret. He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big storm had come close to killing him. He believed it was his hate that had kept him alive, that and no more.
Or perhaps it was the Tower.
For he felt it, too—that pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick heard in a major key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he heard only one. It was the voice of his Red Father, telling him to come. Telling him to kill the mute boy, and the blackbird bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the uncaring White Daddy who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left him behind, but this never crossed Mordred’s mind.)
And when the killing was done, the whispering voice promised, they would destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity.
So Mordred ate, for Mordred was a-hungry. And Mordred slept, for Mordred was a-weary. And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelo’s warm clothes and set out along the freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich sack of gunna on a sled behind him—canned goods, mostly—he had become a young man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old, tall and straight and as fair as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar on his side where Susannah’s bullet had winged him, and the blood-mark on his heel. That heel, he had promised himself, would rest on Roland’s throat, and soon.
CHAPTER I: THE SORE AND THE DOOR (GOODBYE, MY DEAR)
ONE
In the final days of their long journey, after Bill—just Bill now, no longer Stuttering Bill—dropped them off at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean began to suffer frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and do her necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the cold ground, put her hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland knew this was happening—and surely he must have noted her red eyes when she returned to the road—he made no comment. She supposed he knew what she did.
Her time in Mid-World—and End-World—was almost at an end.
TWO
Bill took them in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front reading
FEDERAL OUTPOST 19
TOWER WATCH
TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS FORBIDDEN!
She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the ground was little more than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah thought the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weather—perhaps even pokeberries—but now they were bare and clattering in the nearly constant wind. Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Road—which had once been paved but had now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken ruts—were tall grasses poking out of the thin snow-cover. They whispered in the wind and Susannah knew their song: Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.
“I may go no further,” Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off Little Richard in mid-rave. “Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o’ the Borderlands.”
Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and during that time he had entertained them with a constant stream of what he called “golden oldies.” Some of these were not old at all to Susannah; songs like “Sugar Shack” and “Heat Wave” had been current hits on the radio when she’d returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful silver discs Bill called “ceedees.” He pushed them into a slot in the plow’s instrument-cluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight different speakers. Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed, but she was especially taken by two songs she had never heard before. One was a deliriously happy little rocker called “She Loves You.” The other, sad and reflective, was called “Hey Jude.” Roland actually seemed to know the latter one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different from the ones coming out of the plow’s multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her the group was called The Beetles.
“Funny name for a rock-and-roll band,” Susannah said.
Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plow’s tiny rear seat, tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was currently working his way. Beneath a picture of Roland in profile, he had printed: BEATLES, not Beetles.
“It’s a funny name for a rock-and-roll band no matter which way you spell it,” Susannah said, and that gave her an idea. “Patrick, do you have the touch?” When he frowned and raised his hands—I don’t understand, the gesture said—she rephrased the question. “Can you read my mind?”
He shrugged and smiled. This gesture said I don’t know, but she thought Patrick did know. She thought he knew very well.
THREE
They reached “the Federal” near noon, and there Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick wolfed his and then sat off to one side with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as they sat around the table in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room were covered with TV screens—Susannah guessed there were three hundred or more. They must have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed the rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and one showed a series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach if she looked at it too long. The snow-screens, Bill said, had once shown pictures from satellites in orbit around the Earth, but the cameras in those had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was more interesting. Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the Dark Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing b
ut those lines.
“I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill told them. “Especially if he knew company might be coming. Won’t you have another sandwich? There are plenty, I assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you, Patrick? You’re too thin, you know—far, far too thin.”
Patrick turned his pad around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of Susannah, a tray of neatly cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the other. Like all of Patrick’s pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been produced with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland smiled and nodded. Patrick grinned, holding his teeth together so that the others wouldn’t have to look at the empty hole behind them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new.
“There’s a fleet of vehicles out back,” Bill said, “and while many of them no longer run, some still do. I can give you a truck with four-wheel drive, and while I cannot assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as far as the Dark Tower, which is no more than one hundred and twenty wheels from here.”
Susannah felt a great and fluttery lift-drop in her stomach. One hundred and twenty wheels was a hundred miles, perhaps even a bit less. They were close. So close it was scary.
“You would not want to come upon the Tower after dark,” Bill said. “At least I shouldn’t think so, considering the new resident. But what’s one more night camped at the side of the road to such great travelers as yourselves? Not much, I should say! But even with one last night on the road (and barring breakdowns, which the gods know are always possible), you’d have your goal in sight by mid-morning of tomorrowday.”
Roland considered this long and carefully. Susannah had to tell herself to breathe while he did so, because part of her didn’t want to.