Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  A rather terrible question occurs to her: is she being purposely backward? Is there something here she doesn’t want to confront? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is fucking up communications? Surely that’s a stupid idea—these people she sees are but figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by a bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a car—one slain in this world, one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done (must be done, for there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet laureate.

  Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic that seems to tell her You have it, Suze—you have what we want to show you, you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? It’s the fourth quarter. It’s the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your time-outs are gone. You have to hurry … hurry …

  ELEVEN

  She snapped awake with a gasp. It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet with sweat.

  What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it you’d have me know?

  To this question there was no answer. How could there be? Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down. She lay that way for another hour, but couldn’t get back to sleep.

  TWELVE

  Like Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like riding, Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own.

  They stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to her.

  “What fashes thee, Susannah? I’d have you tell me. I’d have you tell me dan-dinh, even though there’s no longer a tet and I’m your dinh no more.” He smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears back no more. Nor the truth.

  “If I’m still with you when we see your Tower, Roland, things have gone all wrong.”

  “How wrong?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, beginning to weep harder. “There’s supposed to be a door. It’s the Unfound Door. But I don’t know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my dreams and tell me I know—they tell me with their eyes—but I don’t! I swear I don’t!”

  He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasn’t bleeding, but it had begun to grow again.

  “Let be what will be,” said the gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. “Let be what will be, and hush, and let ka work.”

  “You said we’d outrun it.”

  He rocked her in his arms, rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. “I was wrong,” he said. “As thee knows.”

  THIRTEEN

  It was her turn to watch early on the third night, and she was looking back behind them, northwest along the Tower Road, when a hand grasped her shoulder. Terror sprang up in her mind like a jack-in-the-box and she whirled

  (he’s behind me oh dear God Mordred’s got around behind me and it’s the spider!)

  with her hand going to the gun in her belt and yanking it free.

  Patrick recoiled from her, his own face long with terror, raising his hands in front of him. If he’d cried out he would surely have awakened Roland, and then everything might have been different. But he was too frightened to cry out. He made a low sound in his throat and that was all.

  She put the gun back, showed him her empty hands, then pulled him to her and hugged him. At first he was stiff against her—still afraid—but after a little he relaxed.

  “What is it, darling?” she asked him, sotto voce. Then, using Roland’s phrase without even realizing it: “What fashes thee?”

  He pulled away from her and pointed dead north. For a moment she still didn’t understand, and then she saw the orange lights dancing and darting. She judged they were at least five miles away, and she could hardly believe she hadn’t seen them before.

  Still speaking low, so as not to wake Roland, she said: “They’re nothing but foo-lights, sugar—they can’t hurt you. Roland calls em hobs. They’re like St. Elmo’s fire, or something.”

  But he had no idea of what St. Elmo’s fire was; she could see that in his uncertain gaze. She settled again for telling him they couldn’t hurt him, and indeed, this was the closest the hobs had ever come. Even as she looked back at them, they began to dance away, and soon most of them were gone. Perhaps she had thought them away. Once she would have scoffed at such an idea, but no longer.

  Patrick began to relax.

  “Why don’t you go back to sleep, honey? You need to take your rest.” And she needed to take hers, but she dreaded it. Soon she would wake Roland, and sleep, and the dream would come. The ghosts of Jake and Eddie would look at her, more frantic than ever. Wanting her to know something she didn’t, couldn’t know.

  Patrick shook his head.

  “Not sleepy yet?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Well then, why don’t you draw awhile?” Drawing always relaxed him.

  Patrick smiled and nodded and went at once to Ho Fat for his current pad, walking in big exaggerated sneak-steps so as not to wake Roland. It made her smile. Patrick was always willing to draw; she guessed that one of the things that kept him alive in the basement of Dandelo’s hut had been knowing that every now and then the rotten old fuck would give him a pad and one of the pencils. He was as much an addict as Eddie had been at his worst, she reflected, only Patrick’s dope was a narrow line of graphite.

  He sat down and began to draw. Susannah resumed her watch, but soon felt a queer tingling all over her body, as if she were the one being watched. She thought of Mordred again, and then smiled (which hurt; with the sore growing fat again, it always did now). Not Mordred; Patrick. Patrick was watching her.

  Patrick was drawing her.

  She sat still for nearly twenty minutes, and then curiosity overcame her. For Patrick, twenty minutes would be long enough to do the Mona Lisa, and maybe St. Paul’s Basilica in the background for good measure. That tingling sense was so queer, almost not a mental thing at all but something physical.

  She went to him, but Patrick at first held the pad against his chest with unaccustomed shyness. But he wanted her to look; that was in his eyes. It was almost a love-look, but she thought it was the drawn Susannah he’d fallen in love with.

  “Come on, honeybunch,” she said, and put a hand on the pad. But she would not tug it away from him, not even if he wanted her to. He was the artist; let it be wholly his decision whether or not to show his work. “Please?”

  He held the pad against him a moment longer. Then—shyly, not looking at her—he held it out. She took it, and looked down at herself. For a moment she could hardly breathe, it was that good. The wide eyes. The high cheekbones, which her father had called “those jewels of Ethiopia.” The full lips, which Eddie had so loved to kiss. It was her, it was her to the very life … but it was also more than her. She would never have thought love could shine with such perfect nakedness from the lines made with a pencil, but here that love was, oh say true, say so true; love of the boy for the woman who had saved him, who had pulled him from the dark hole where he otherwise would surely have died. Love for her as a mother, love for her as a woman.

  “Patrick, it’s wonderful!” she said.

  He looked at her anxiously. Doubtfully. Really? his eyes asked her, and she realized that only he—the poor needy Patrick inside, who had lived with this ability all his life and so took it for granted—could doubt the simple beauty of what he had done. Drawing made him happy; this much he’d always known. That his pictures could make others happy … that idea would take some getting used to.
She wondered again how long Dandelo had had him, and how the mean old thing had come by Patrick in the first place. She supposed she’d never know. Meantime, it seemed very important to convince him of his own worth.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is wonderful. You’re a fine artist, Patrick. Looking at this makes me feel good.”

  This time he forgot to hold his teeth together. And that smile, tongueless or not, was so wonderful she could have eaten it up. It made her fears and anxieties seem small and silly.

  “May I keep it?”

  Patrick nodded eagerly. He made a tearing motion with one hand, then pointed at her. Yes! Tear it off! Take it! Keep it!

  She started to do so, then paused. His love (and his pencil) had made her beautiful. The only thing to spoil that beauty was the black splotch beside her mouth. She turned the drawing toward him, tapped the sore on it, then touched it on her own face. And winced. Even the lightest touch hurt. “This is the only damned thing,” she said.

  He shrugged, raising his open hands to his shoulders, and she had to laugh. She did it softly so as not to wake Roland, but yes, she did have to laugh. A line from some old movie had occurred to her: I paint what I see.

  Only this wasn’t paint, and it suddenly occurred to her that he could take care of the rotten, ugly, painful thing. As it existed on paper, at least.

  Then she’ll be my twin, she thought affectionately. My better half; my pretty twin sis—

  And suddenly she understood—

  Everything? Understood everything?

  Yes, she would think much later. Not in any coherent fashion that could be written down—if a + b = c, then c – b = a and c – a = b—but yes, she understood everything. Intuited everything. No wonder the dream-Eddie and dream-Jake had been impatient with her; it was so obvious.

  Patrick, drawing her.

  Nor was this the first time she had been drawn.

  Roland had drawn her to his world … with magic.

  Eddie had drawn her to himself with love.

  As had Jake.

  Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family.

  Ka-tet was love.

  To draw is to make a picture with a pencil, or maybe charcoal.

  To draw is also to fascinate, to compel, and to bring forward. To bring one out of one’s self.

  The drawers were where Detta went to fulfill herself.

  Patrick, that tongueless boy genius, pent up in the wilderness. Pent up in the drawers. And now? Now?

  Now he my forspecial, thought Susanna/Odetta/Detta, and reached into her pocket for the glass jar, knowing exactly what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

  When she handed back the pad without tearing off the sheet that now held her image, Patrick looked badly disappointed.

  “Nar, nar,” said she (and in the voice of many). “Only there’s something I’d have you do before I take it for my pretty, for my precious, for my ever, to keep and know how I was at this where, at this when.”

  She held out one of the pink rubber pieces, understanding now why Dandelo had cut them off. For he’d had his reasons.

  Patrick took what she offered and turned it over between his fingers, frowning, as if he had never seen such a thing before. Susannah was sure he had, but how many years ago? How close might he have come to disposing of his tormentor, once and for all? And why hadn’t Dandelo just killed him then?

  Because once he took away the erasers he thought he was safe, she thought.

  Patrick was looking at her, puzzled. Beginning to be upset.

  Susannah sat down beside him and pointed at the blemish on the drawing. Then she put her fingers delicately around Patrick’s wrist and drew it toward the paper. At first he resisted, then let his hand with the pink nubbin in it be tugged forward.

  She thought of the shadow on the land that hadn’t been a shadow at all but a herd of great, shaggy beasts Roland called bannock. She thought of how she’d been able to smell the dust when Patrick began to draw the dust. And she thought of how, when Patrick had drawn the herd closer than it actually was (artistic license, and we all say thankya), it had actually looked closer. She remembered thinking that her eyes had adjusted and now marveled at her own stupidity. As if eyes could adjust to distance the way they could adjust to the dark.

  No, Patrick had moved them closer. Had moved them closer by drawing them closer.

  When the hand holding the eraser was almost touching the paper, she took her own hand away—this had to be all Patrick, she was somehow sure of it. She moved her fingers back and forth, miming what she wanted. He didn’t get it. She did it again, then pointed to the sore beside the full lower lip.

  “Make it gone, Patrick,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “It’s ugly, make it gone.” Again she made that rubbing gesture in the air. “Erase it.”

  This time he got it. She saw the light in his eyes. He held the pink nubbin up to her. Perfectly pink it was—not a smudge of graphite on it. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as if to ask if she was sure.

  She nodded.

  Patrick lowered the eraser to the sore and began to rub it on the paper, tentatively at first. Then, as he saw what was happening, he worked with more spirit.

  FOURTEEN

  She felt the same queer tingling sensation, but when he’d been drawing, it had been all over her. Now it was in only one place, to the right side of her mouth. As Patrick got the hang of the eraser and bore down with it, the tingling became a deep and monstrous itch. She had to clutch her hands deep into the dirt on either side of her to keep from reaching up and clawing at the sore, scratching it furiously, and never mind if she tore it wide open and sent a pint of blood gushing down her deerskin shirt.

  It be over in a few more seconds, it have to be, it have to be, oh dear God please LET IT END—

  Patrick, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about her. He was looking down at his picture, his hair hanging to either side of his face and obscuring most of it, completely absorbed by this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately … then a little harder (the itch intensified) … then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking. That itch was suddenly everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin clouds of gnats, it shivered at the very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard.

  I’ll scream, I can’t help it, I have to scream—

  She was drawing in her breath to do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain was gone, as well. She reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated.

  I don’t dare.

  You better dare! Detta responded indignantly. After all you been through—all we been through—you must have enough backbone left to touch yo’ own damn face, you yella bitch!

  She brought her fingers down to the skin. The smooth skin. The sore which had so troubled her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when she looked in a mirror or a still pool of water, she would not even see a scar.

  FIFTEEN

  Patrick worked a little longer—first with the eraser, then with the pencil, then with the eraser again—but Susannah felt no itch and not even a faint tingle. It was as though, once he had passed some critical point, the sensations just ceased. She wondered how old Patrick had been when Dandelo snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young, anyway. She was sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro.

  Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle, she thought. Once you learn how, you never forget.

  She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long minutes, her patience was rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and showed her the picture. He had erased the blemish completely and then faintly shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber.

  “Very
nice,” she said, but that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasn’t it?

  So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Patrick, it’s beautiful.”

  The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it.

  Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what would happen if she tore it—tore her—right down the middle. She noted as she did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the time he’d known her, and he had drawn it in near-photographic detail. Now it was gone—her exploring fingers told her so—yet Patrick wasn’t registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When he’d erased it from his drawing, he’d also erased it from his own mind and memory.

  “Patrick?”

  He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that she was also scared to death didn’t change that in the slightest.

  “Will you draw something else for me?”

  He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see:

  ?

  She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly.

  Susannah said: “I want you to draw me something that isn’t there.”

  He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heart—Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what you meant.