by Stephen King
This was unlike the rose in the vacant lot in one crucial way: the feeling of sickness and the faint voices of discord were gone. This one was rich with health as well as full of light and love. It and all the others … they … they must …
They feed the Beams, don’t they? With their songs and their perfume. As the Beams feed them. It’s a living force-field, a giving and taking, all spinning out from the Tower. And this is only the first, the farthest outrider. In Can’-Ka No Rey there are tens of thousands, just like this.
The thought made him faint with amazement. Then came another that filled him with anger and fear: the only one with a view of that great red blanket was insane. Would blight them all in an instant, if allowed free rein to do so.
There was a hesitant tap on his shoulder. It was Patrick, with Oy at his heel. Patrick pointed to the grassy area beside the rose, then made eating gestures. Pointed at the rose and made drawing motions. Roland wasn’t very hungry, but the boy’s other idea pleased him a great deal.
“Yes,” he said. “We’ll have a bite here, then maybe I’ll take me a little siesta while you draw the rose. Will you make two pictures of it, Patrick?” He showed the two remaining fingers on his right hand to make sure Patrick understood.
The young man frowned and cocked his head, still not understanding. His hair hung to one shoulder in a bright sheaf. Roland thought of how Susannah had washed that hair in a stream in spite of Patrick’s hooted protests. It was the sort of thing Roland himself would never have thought to do, but it made the young fellow look a lot better. Looking at that sheaf of shining hair made him miss Susannah in spite of the rose’s song. She had brought grace to his life. It wasn’t a word that had occurred to him until she was gone.
Meanwhile, here was Patrick, wildly talented but awfully slow on the uptake.
Roland gestured to his pad, then to the rose. Patrick nodded—that part he got. Then Roland raised two of the fingers on his good hand and pointed to the pad again. This time the light broke on Patrick’s face. He pointed to the rose, to the pad, to Roland, and then to himself.
“That’s right, big boy,” Roland said. “A picture of the rose for you and one for me. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
Patrick nodded enthusiastically, setting to work while Roland rustled the grub. Once again Roland fixed three plates, and once again Oy refused his share. When Roland looked into the bumbler’s gold-ringed eyes he saw an emptiness there—a kind of loss—that hurt him deep inside. And Oy couldn’t stand to miss many meals; he was far too thin already. Trail-frayed, Cuthbert would have said, probably smiling. In need of some hot sassafras and salts. But the gunslinger had no sassy here.
“Why do’ee look so?” Roland asked the bumbler crossly. “If’ee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had the chance! Why will’ee cast thy sad houken’s eyes on me now?”
Oy looked at him a moment longer, and Roland saw that he had hurt the little fellow’s feelings; ridiculous but true. Oy walked away, little squiggle of tail drooping. Roland felt like calling him back, but that would have been more ridiculous yet, would it not? What plan did he have? To apologize to a billy-bumbler?
He felt angry and ill at ease with himself, feelings he had never suffered before hauling Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from America-side into his life. Before they’d come he’d felt almost nothing, and while that was a narrow way to live, in some ways it wasn’t so bad; at least you didn’t waste time wondering if you should apologize to animals for taking a high tone to them, by the gods.
Roland hunkered by the rose, leaning into the soothing power of its song and the blaze of light—healthy light—from its center. Then Patrick hooted at him, gesturing for Roland to move away so he could see it and draw it. This added to Roland’s sense of dislocation and annoyance, but he moved back without a word of protest. He had, after all, asked Patrick to draw it, hadn’t he? He thought of how, if Susannah had been here, their eyes would have met with amused understanding, as the eyes of parents do over the antics of a small child. But she wasn’t here, of course; she’d been the last of them and now she was gone, too.
“All right, can’ee see howgit rosen-gaff a tweakit better?” he asked, striving to sound comic and only sounding cross—cross and tired.
Patrick, at least, didn’t react to the harshness in the gunslinger’s tone; probably didn’t even ken what I said, Roland thought. The mute boy sat with his ankles crossed and his pad balanced on his thighs, his half-finished plate of food set off to one side.
“Don’t get so busy you forget to eat that,” Roland said. “You mind me, now.” He got another distracted nod for his pains and gave up. “I’m going to snooze, Patrick. It’ll be a long afternoon.” And an even longer night, he added to himself … and yet he had the same consolation as Mordred: tonight would likely be the last. He didn’t know for sure what waited for him in the Dark Tower at the end of the field of roses, but even if he managed to put paid to the Crimson King, he felt quite sure that this was his last march. He didn’t believe he would ever leave Can’-Ka No Rey, and that was all right. He was very tired. And, despite the power of the rose, sad.
Roland of Gilead put an arm over his eyes and was asleep at once.
FOUR
He didn’t sleep for long before Patrick woke him with a child’s enthusiasm to show him the first picture of the rose he’d drawn—the sun suggested no more than ten minutes had passed, fifteen at most.
Like all of his drawings, this one had a queer power. Patrick had captured the rose almost to the life, even though he had nothing but a pencil to work with. Still, Roland would much have preferred another hour’s sleep to this exercise in art appreciation. He nodded his approval, though—no more grouch and grump in the presence of such a lovely thing, he promised himself—and Patrick smiled, happy even with so little. He tossed back the sheet and began drawing the rose again. One picture for each of them, just as Roland had asked.
Roland could have slept again, but what was the point? The mute boy would be done with the second picture in a matter of minutes and would only wake him again. He went to Oy instead, and stroked the bumbler’s dense fur, something he rarely did.
“I’m sorry I spoke rough to’ee, fella,” Roland said. “Will you not set me on with a word?”
But Oy would not.
Fifteen minutes later, Roland re-packed the few things he’d taken out of the cart, spat into his palms, and hoisted the handles again. The cart was lighter now, had to be, but it felt heavier.
Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
Soon Ho Fat II had Patrick Danville in it, as well. He crawled up, made himself a little nest, and fell asleep almost at once. Roland plodded on, head down, shadow growing longer at his heels. Oy walked beside him.
One more night, the gunslinger thought. One more night, one more day to follow, and then it’s done. One way or t’ other.
He let the pulse of the Tower and its many singing voices fill his head and lighten his heels … at least a little. There were more roses now, dozens scattered on either side of the road and brightening the otherwise dull countryside. A few were growing in the road itself and he was careful to detour around them. Tired though he might be, he would not crush a single one, or roll a wheel over a single fallen petal.
FIVE
He stopped for the night while the sun was still well above the horizon, too weary to go farther even though there would be at least another two hours of daylight. Here was a stream that had gone dry, but in its bed grew a riot of those beautiful wild roses. Their songs didn’t diminish his weariness, but they revived his spirit to some extent. He thought this was true for Patrick and Oy, as well, and that was good. When Patrick had awakened he’d looked around eagerly at first. Then his face had darkened, and Roland knew he was realizing all over again that Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be no crying here.
There was
a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank—at least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods—but they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah’s world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSIT against the deepening sky.
Before making a fire and cooking them an early supper—canned goods from Dandelo’s pantry would do well enough tonight, he reckoned—Roland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses, strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the smell and the sound were refreshing.
Feeling a little better, he gathered wood from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of Patrick’s pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light, speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it: “Spark-a-dark, who’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.”
While he waited for the fire to first grow and then die down to a bed of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York. Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it would last for fifty years.
Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, the hands had very slowly begun to move backward.
He looked at this for a little while, fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there: key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam from the windows that spiraled upward.
They didn’t know it would do that, he thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket, checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well.
Oy would touch not a single bite.
SIX
Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in black—the night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deck—those twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the longest of Roland’s life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched in front of his heavy eyes: Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestling in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced around them, barking.
Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer to the edge of unconsciousness. Each time he expected to see the spider with the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs, dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of the wind.
But he waits. He bides. And if I sleep—when I sleep—he’ll be on us.
Around three in the morning he roused himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hide-covered hump. Of Oy there was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jake’s old friend a little beyond the edge of the failing firelight—or at least the gleam of his gold-ringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared, probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws.
He’s tired, too, Roland thought, and why not?
The question of what would become of Oy after tomorrow tried to rise to the surface of the gunslinger’s troubled, tired mind, and Roland pushed it away. He got up (in his weariness his hands slipped down to his formerly troublesome hip, as if expecting to find the pain still there), went to Patrick, and shook him awake. It took some doing, but at last the boy’s eyes opened. That wasn’t good enough for Roland. He grasped Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. When the boy tried to slump back down again, Roland shook him. Hard. He looked at Roland with dazed incomprehension.
“Help me build up the fire, Patrick.”
Doing that should wake him up at least a little. And once the fire was burning bright again, Patrick would have to stand a brief watch. Roland didn’t like the idea, knew full well that leaving Patrick in charge of the night would be dangerous, but trying to watch the rest of it on his own would be even more dangerous. He needed sleep. An hour or two would be enough, and surely Patrick could stay awake that long.
Patrick was willing enough to gather up some sticks and put them on the fire, although he moved like a bougie—a reanimated corpse. And when the fire was blazing, he slumped back down in his former place with his arms between his bony knees, already more asleep than awake. Roland thought he might actually have to slap the boy to bring him around, and would later wish—bitterly—that he had done just that.
“Patrick, listen to me.” He shook Patrick by the shoulders hard enough to make his long hair fly, but some of it flopped back into his eyes. Roland brushed it away. “I need you to stay awake and watch. Just for an hour … just until … look up, Patrick! Look! Gods, don’t you dare go to sleep on me again! Do you see that? The brightest star of all those close to us!”
It was Old Mother Roland was pointing to, and Patrick nodded at once. There was a gleam of interest in his eye now, and the gunslinger thought that was encouraging. It was Patrick’s “I want to draw” look. And if he sat drawing Old Mother as she shone in the widest fork of the biggest dead cottonwood, then the chances were good that he’d stay awake. Maybe until dawn, if he got fully involved.
“Here, Patrick.” He made the boy sit against the base of the tree. It was bony and knobby and—Roland hoped—uncomfortable enough to prohibit sleep. All these movements felt to Roland like the sort you made underwater. Oh, he was tired. So tired. “Do you still see the star?”
Patrick nodded eagerly. He seemed to have thrown off his sleepiness, and the gunslinger thanked the gods for this favor.
“When it goes behind that thick branch and you can’t see it or draw it anymore without getting up … you call me. Wake me up, no matter how hard it is. Do you understand?”
Patrick nodded at once, but Roland had now traveled with him long enough to know that such a nod meant little or nothing. Eager to please, that’s what he was. If you asked him if nine and nine made nineteen, he would nod with the same instant enthusiasm.
“When you can’t see it anymore from where you’re sitting …” His own words seemed to be coming from far away, now. He’d just have to hope that Patrick understood. The tongueless boy had taken out his pad, at least, and a freshly sharpened pencil.
That’s my best protection, Roland’s mind muttered as he stumbled back to his little pile of hides between the campfire and Ho Fat II. He won’t fall asleep while he’s drawing, will he?
He hoped not, but supposed he didn’t really know. And it didn’t matter, because he, Roland of Gilead, was going to sleep in any case. He’d done the best he could, and it would have to be enough.
“An hour,” he muttered, and his voice was far and wee in his own ears. “Wake me in an hour … when the star … when Old Mother goes behind …”
But Roland was unable to finish. He didn’t even know what he was saying anymore. Exhaustion grabbed him and bore him swiftly away into dreamless sleep.
SEVEN
Mordred saw it all through the far-seeing glass eyes. His fever had soared, and in its bright flame, his own exhaustion had at least temporarily departed. He watched with avid interest as the gunsli
nger woke the mute boy—the Artist—and bullied him into helping him build up the fire. He watched, rooting for the mute to finish this chore and then go back to sleep before the gunslinger could stop him. That didn’t happen, unfortunately. They had camped near a grove of dead cottonwoods, and Roland led the Artist to the biggest tree. Here he pointed up at the sky. It was strewn with stars, but Mordred reckoned Old White Gunslinger Daddy was pointing to Old Mother, because she was the brightest. At last the Artist, who didn’t seem to be rolling a full barrow (at least not in the brains department) seemed to understand. He got out his pad and had already set to sketching as Old White Daddy stumbled a little way off, still muttering instructions and orders to which the Artist was pretty clearly paying absolutely no attention at all. Old White Daddy collapsed so suddenly that for a moment Mordred feared that perhaps the strip of jerky that served the son of a bitch as a heart had finally given up beating. Then Roland stirred in the grass, resettling himself, and Mordred, lying on a knoll about ninety yards west of the dry streambed, felt his own heartbeat slow. And deep though the Old White Gunslinger Daddy’s exhaustion might be, his training and his long lineage, going all the way back to the Eld himself, would be enough to wake him with his gun in his hand the second the Artist gave one of his wordless but devilishly loud cries. Cramps seized Mordred, the deepest yet. He doubled over, fighting to hold his human shape, fighting not to scream, fighting not to die. He heard another of those long flabbering noises from below and felt more of the lumpy brown stew begin coursing down his legs. But his preternaturally keen nose smelled more than excreta in this new mess; this time he smelled blood as well as shit. He thought the pain would never end, that it would go on deepening until it tore him in two, but at last it began to let up. He looked at his left hand and was not entirely surprised to see that the fingers had blackened and fused together. They would never come back to human again, those fingers; he believed he had but only one more change left in him. Mordred wiped sweat from his brow with his right hand and raised the bin-doculars to his eyes again, praying to his Red Daddy that the stupid mutie boy would be asleep. But he was not. He was leaning against the cottonwood tree and looking up between the branches and drawing Old Mother. That was the moment when Mordred Deschain came closest to despair. Like Roland, he thought drawing was the one thing that would likely keep the idiot boy awake. Therefore, why not give in to the change while he had the heat of this latest fever-spike to fuel him with its destructive energy? Why not take his chance? It was Roland he wanted, after all, not the boy; surely he could, in his spider form, sweep down on the gunslinger rapidly enough to grab him and pull him against the spider’s craving mouth. Old White Daddy might get off one shot, possibly even two, but Mordred thought he could take one or two, if the flying bits of lead didn’t find the white node on the spider’s back: his dual body’s brain. And once I pull him in, I’ll never let him go until he’s sucked dry, nothing but a dust-mummy like the other one, Mia. He relaxed, ready to let the change sweep over him, and then another voice spoke from the center of his mind. It was the voice of his Red Daddy, the one who was imprisoned on the side of the Dark Tower and needed Mordred alive, at least one more day, in order to set him free.