Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”

  And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah’s voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire, started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patrick’s magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslinger’s memory, too.

  “Susannah, thy face! What’s happened to thy—”

  “Hush, Roland, if you love me.”

  The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze.

  Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was bright under the stars.

  Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the question-mark he had already drawn:

  How tall?

  Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about six-foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling.

  “And look you at something that has to be on it,” she said, and took a branch from their little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didn’t think about them overmuch. She sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would either open on some place she didn’t want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness. Detta—brash, foul-mouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her savior—might step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldn’t count on that. On her heart’s deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself.

  So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement:

  “Unfound,” Roland breathed. “Susannah, what—how—”

  “Hush,” she repeated.

  Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw.

  SIXTEEN

  She kept looking around for the door, but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very small even after Roland had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the prairie, at least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the blemish had been. Holding the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the eraser’s marks. Patrick had concealed what few traces he’d left behind with great cunning, and Roland had found them only with the closest scrutiny; it was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain.

  “No wonder the old man cut off his erasers,” he said, giving the picture back to her.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive leap: that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) un-create by erasing, he might be able to create by drawing. When she mentioned the herd of bannock that had seemed mysteriously closer, Roland rubbed his forehead like a man who has a nasty headache.

  “I should have seen that. Should have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, I’m getting old.”

  She ignored that—she’d heard it before—and told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake, being sure to mention the product-names on the sweatshirts, the choral voices, the offer of hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this dream before now?” Roland asked. “Why didn’t you ask for help in interpreting it?”

  She looked at him steadily, thinking she had been right not to ask for his help. Yes—no matter how much that might hurt him. “You’ve lost two. How eager would you have been to lose me, as well?”

  He flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. “Thee speaks ill of me, Susannah, and have thought worse.”

  “Perhaps I have,” she said. “If so, I say sorry. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted myself. Part of me wants to see the Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if Patrick can draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, it’s not the real world it opens on. That’s what the names on the shirts mean, I’m sure of it.”

  “You mustn’t think that,” Roland said. “Reality is seldom a thing of black and white, I think, of is and isn’t, be and not be.”

  Patrick made a hooting sound and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned toward them so they could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the Unfound Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasn’t printed on it, and the doorknob was plain shiny metal—no crossed pencils adorned it—but that was all right. She hadn’t bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and understanding.

  They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn

  (riddle-de-dum)

  mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory answer … except it was the human condition, wasn’t it? The answers that mattered never came easily.

  Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an interrogative quality. She suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically dying of anxiety, and why not? He had just executed his first commission, and wanted to know what his patrono d’arte thought of it.

  “It’s great, Patrick—terrific.”

  “Yes,” Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to him exactly like those he’d found as he staggered along the beach of the Western Sea, delirious and dying of the lobstrosity’s poisoned bite. It was as if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his head and seen an actual picture of that door—a fottergraff.

  Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around desperately. And when she began to swing along on her hands toward the edge of the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply, reminding her that Mordred might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordred’s friend.

  Impatient as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well what had happened to Mordred’s body-mother, and how quickly it had happened. Yet it hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the coming day. If she was still with him, if she saw it with him, she thought its power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer. Now, given a choice between the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the door. But as they drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper and more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the door would be harder to do.

  “I don’t see it,” she said despairingly. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is no damn door. Oh, Roland—”

  “I don’t think you were wrong,” Roland told her. He spoke with obvious reluctance, but as a man will when he has a job to do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe this woman a debt, he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her into this world, where she’d learned the art of murder and fallen in love and been left bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her into this present sorrow? If he could make that ri
ght, he had an obligation to do so. His desire to keep her with him—and at the risk of her own life—was pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training.

  More important than that, it was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect her. It broke what remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his strange and wonderful ka-tet, but if it was what she wanted, what she needed, then he must do it. And he thought he could do it, for he had seen something about the young man’s drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there; something that wasn’t.

  “Look thee,” he said gently, showing her the picture. “Do you see how hard he’s tried to please thee, Susannah?”

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course I do, but—”

  “It took him ten minutes to do this, I should judge, and most of his drawings, good as they are, are the work of three or four at most, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t understand you!” She nearly screamed this.

  Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the while looking at Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes.

  “He worked so hard to give you what you want that there’s only the Door. It stands by itself, all alone on the paper. It has no …no… “

  He searched for the right word. Vannay’s ghost whispered it dryly into his ear.

  “It has no context!”

  For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light of understanding began to break in her eyes. Roland didn’t wait; he simply dropped his good left hand on Patrick’s shoulder and told him to put the door behind Susannah’s little electric golf-cart, which she had taken to calling Ho Fat III.

  Patrick was happy to oblige. For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him a reason to use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this time—almost carelessly, an observer might have said—but the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and didn’t think Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his pencil down, and as he did, there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark, streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more burned straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the electric cart, was a door Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis, in the Cave of the Voices.

  SEVENTEEN

  Susannah waited until dawn, at first passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside again—what would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag in which they were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would probably laugh anyway … or scream and run at the very sight of her. The Susannah Dean who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks not like a college graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say sorry. No, to civilized city people she’d probably look like some kind of freak-show escapee. And once she went through this door, would there be any going back? Never. Never in life.

  So she put her gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go along with her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she told him, although she knew he didn’t remember that world at all—either he’d been taken from it too young, or the trauma of being snatched away had erased his memory.

  Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was squatted on his hunkers, looking at him. “Either way, son,” the gunslinger said. “You can draw in either world, tell ya true. Although where she’s going, there’ll be more to appreciate it.”

  He wants him to stay, she thought, and was angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his head a minute shake. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that meant—

  And no, she didn’t just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while she’d known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her. To Detta, maybe, but not to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn’t told them all he knew, but outright lie …? No. They’d been ka-tet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the devil his due.

  Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them:

  I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new.

  As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth.

  And did she see relief on Roland’s face? If so, she hated him for it.

  “All right, Patrick,” she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and patted his hand. “I understand how you feel. And while it’s true that people can be cruel …cruel and mean … there’s plenty who are kind. Listen, thee: I’m not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open.”

  He nodded quickly. Grateful I ain’t goan try no harder t’change his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too!

  Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.

  EIGHTEEN

  But as the day brightened (revealing a medium-sized herd of grazing bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air …and then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta thought, we’d see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.

  She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out it wouldn’t. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the cart’s electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the cart’s little bullet nose almost touching it.

  She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed make-believe smile. “All ri’, Roland—Ah’ll say g’bye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you reach y’damn Tower, and—”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing. Challenging him to turn this into something she didn’t want it to be. Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. C’mon, honky white boy, lessee you do it.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s on yo’ mine, big boy?”

  “I’d not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Only in Detta’s angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean?

  “You know.”

  She shook her head defiantly. Doan.

  “For one thing,” he said, taking her trail-toughened left hand gently in his mutilated right one, “there’s another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I’m not speaking of Patrick.”

  For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy.

  “If Detta asks him, he’ll surely stay, for
she’s never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him … why, then I don’t know.”

  Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back—Susannah understood now that she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer wanted to be—but for now she was gone.

  “Oy?” she said gently. “Will you come with me, honey? It may be we’ll find Jake again. Maybe not quite the same, but still …”

  Oy, who had been almost completely silent during their trek across the Badlands and the White Lands of Empathica and the open rangelands, now spoke. “Ake?” he said. But he spoke doubtfully, as one who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry, and Detta all but guaranteed she wouldn’t cry, but now Detta was gone and the tears were here again.

  “Jake,” she said. “You remember Jake, honeybunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie.”

  “Ake? Ed?” With a little more certainty now. He did remember. “Come with me,” she urged, and Oy started forward as if he would jump up in the cart beside her. Then, with no idea at all why she should say it, she added: “There are other worlds than these.”

  Oy stopped as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again, and she felt a moment of hope: perhaps there could still be some little ka-tet, a dantete-tet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shin-naro cameras.

  Instead, Oy trotted back to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had walked far, those boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking was almost done.

  “Olan,” said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice rolled a stone against her heart. She turned bitterly to the old man with the big iron on his hip.

  “There,” she said. “You have your own glammer, don’t you? Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?”

  “No,” said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such loneliness on a human face. “Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New York. Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while with me? That would make me happy.”