by Stephen King
“It’s Sterno,” she told the gunslinger when he inquired.
“Good stuff. You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue flame hot enough to cook on.”
“I thought we’d build a little fire behind the hotel,” he said. “I won’t need this smelly stuff to make one, certainly.” He said it with a touch of contempt.
“No, I suppose not. But it might come in handy.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but…” She shrugged.
Near the door to the street they passed what appeared to be a janitor’s closet filled with piles of rickrack. Susannah had had enough of the Dogan for one day and was anxious to be out, but Roland wanted to have a look. He ignored the mop buckets and brooms and cleaning supplies in favor of a jumble of cords and straps heaped in a corner. Susannah guessed from the boards on top of which they lay that this stuff had once been used to build temporary scaffoldings. She also had an idea what Roland wanted the strappage for, and her heart sank. It was like going all the way back to the beginning.
“Thought I was done with piggybackin,” she said crossly, and with more than a touch of Detta in her voice.
“It’s the only way, I think,” Roland said. “I’m just glad I’m whole enough again to carry your weight.”
“And that passage underneath’s the only way through? You’re sure of that?”
“I suppose there might be a way through the castle—” he began, but Susannah was already shaking her head.
“I’ve been up top with Mia, don’t forget. The drop into the Discordia on the far side’s at least five hundred feet. Probably more. There might have been stairs in the long-ago, but they’re gone now.”
“Then we’re for the passage,” he said, “and the passage is for us. Mayhap we’ll find something for you to ride in once we’re on the other side. In another town or village.”
Susannah was shaking her head again. “I think this is where civilization ends, Roland. And I think we better bundle up as much as we can, because it’s gonna get cold.”
Bundling-up materials seemed to be in short supply, however, unlike the foodstuffs. No one had thought to store a few extra sweaters and fleece-lined jackets in vacuum-packed cans. There were blankets, but even in storage they had grown thin and fragile, just short of useless.
“I don’t give a bedbug’s ass,” she said in a wan voice. “Just as long as we get out of this place.”
“We will,” he said.
Three
Susannah is in Central Park, and it’s cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky. She’s looking down at the polar bear (who’s rolling around on his rocky island, seeming to enjoy the cold just fine) when a hand snakes around her waist. Warm lips smack her cold cheek. She turns and there stand Eddie and Jake. They are wearing identical grins and nearly identical red stocking caps. Eddie’s says MERRY across the front and Jake’s says CHRISTMAS. She opens her mouth to tell them “You boys can’t be here, you boys are dead,” and then she realizes, with a great and singing relief, that all that business was just a dream she had. And really, how could you doubt it? There are no talking animals called billy-bumblers, not really, no taheen-creatures with the bodies of humans and the heads of animals, no places called Fedic or Castle Discordia.
Most of all, there are no gunslingers. John Kennedy was the last, her chauffeur Andrew was right about that.
“Brought you hot chocolate,” Eddie says and holds it out to her. It’s the perfect cup of hot chocolate, mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream; she can smell it, and as she takes it she can feel his fingers inside his gloves and the first flakes of that winter’s snow drift down between them. She thinks how good it is to be alive in plain old New York, how great that reality is reality, that they are together in the Year of Our Lord—
What Year of Our Lord?
She frowns, because this is a serious question, isn’t it? After all, Eddie’s an eighties man and she never got any further than 1964 (or was it ’65?). As for Jake, Jake Chambers with the word CHRISTMAS printed on the front of his happy hat, isn’t he from the seventies? And if the three of them represent three decades from the second half of the twentieth century, what is their commonality? What year is this?
“NINETEEN,” says a voice out of the air (perhaps it is the voice of Bango Skank, the Great Lost Character), “this is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT. All your friends are dead.”
With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. When she looks down at the polar bear she sees it’s lying dead on its rock island with its paws in the air. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by a musty smell: old plaster, ancient wood. The odor of a hotel room where no one has slept for years.
No, her mind moans. No, I want Central Park, I want Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, I want the smell of hot chocolate and the sight of December’s first hesitant snowflakes, I’ve had enough of Fedic, In-World, Mid-World, and End-World. I want My-World. I don’t care if I ever see the Dark Tower.
Eddie’s and Jake’s lips move in unison, as if they are singing a song she can’t hear, but it’s not a song; the words she reads on their lips just before the dream breaks apart are
Four
“Watch out for Dandelo.”
She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early not-quite-dawn light. And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no other. She felt her cheeks and wiped away the wetness there. It wasn’t quite cold enough to freeze the tears to her skin, but just-a-damn-bout.
She looked around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing with all her heart that her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she’d had to sleep on the floor—the bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting to disintegrate—and her back was stiff. For another, the blankets she’d used as a makeshift mattress and the ones she’d wrapped around her had all torn to rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with their dust, tickling her nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming down with the world’s worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed hands.
And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes Dean this morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a beautiful dream to a world
(this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead)
where she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it. The problem was that the place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The problem was that she was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck and depressed. The problem was that, in this hour before dawn, in this frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air was full of musty blanket-fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had been squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back.
She wanted Eddie.
“I see you’re up, too,” said a voice, and Susannah whirled around, pivoting on her hands so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had woven the straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar, and it hung over his left shoulder. Hung over his right was a leather sack filled with their new possessions and the remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland’s feet, looking at her solemnly.
“You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai Deschain,” she said.
“You’ve been crying.”
“Isn’t any of your nevermind if I have been or if I haven’t.”
“We’ll feel better once we’re out of here,” he said. “Fedic’s curdled.”
She knew exactly what he meant. The wind had kicked up fierce in the night, and when it screamed around the eaves of the hotel and the saloon next door, it had sounded to Susannah like the screams of children—wee ones so lost in time and space they would never find their w
ay home.
“All right, but Roland—before we cross the street and go into that Dogan, I want your promise on one thing.”
“What promise would you have?”
“If something looks like getting us—some monster out of the Devil’s Arse or one from the todash between-lands—you put a bullet in my head before it happens. When it comes to yourself you can do whatever you want, but…what? What are you holding that out for?” It was one of his revolvers.
“Because I’m only really good with one of them these days. And because I won’t be the one to take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however—”
“Roland, your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me,” she said. Then she took the gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. “As for that thing, if you think I’m gonna ride in it before I have to, you’re crazy.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “It’s better when it’s the two of us, isn’t it?”
She sighed, then nodded. “A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let’s blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses.”
Five
He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs, Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap. At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the bottom.
“That’s the end of that,” she said when the echoes had finally ceased. “You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it’s going to do me now.”
“We’ll see,” Roland said, starting down. “You might be surprised.”
“That thing ain’t gonna work fo’ shit an we bofe know it,” Detta said. Oy uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That’s right.
Six
The chair did survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they’d come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.
“There, now, dint I tell you?” she asked, and cackled. “Reckon it’s time to start totin dat barge, Roland!”
He eyed her. “Can you make Detta go away?”
She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said. She flushed. “Yes,” she said in a remarkably small voice. “Say sorry, Roland.”
He picked her up and got her settled into the harness. Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan—as creepy as it was beneath the Dogan—Susannah was glad that they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn’t think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower.
The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her way to Roland’s obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn’t todash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag.
Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?
Seven
They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.
Under the main message they had signed their names: Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted’s, and reading them made her feel like crying:
“God love em,” Susannah said hoarsely. “May God love and keep em all.”
“Keep-um,” said a small and rather timid voice from Roland’s heel. They looked down.
“Decided to talk again, sugarpie?” Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.
Eight
Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and passages—some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and more menacing—and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her. (“Although not one single change of clothes,” Susannah said with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that looked to Roland like the ones he’d found on the beach, they heard an unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.
“Do you know what that says?” she asked. Roland—although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more—shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you’d want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you be able to?
Maybe not.
Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. “I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now,” she said, and pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. “Look, there’s our tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We’re almost there now, Roland, promise you.”
But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.
“I don’t know—” Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say, Is this what you wanted?
“Yeah,” she said, obviously relieved. “Okay. Look, just like I told you.” She pointed to a door marked FORD’S THEATER, 1865 SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. “What we want’s just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right—I think. Anyway, I’ll know it when I see it.”
Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as “the world above.” If so, they were in trouble.
It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a little engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger’s left heel. There was no dust on the floor, a
nd the tracks they’d seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a little scream.
“Steady-oh,” Roland said. “It can’t break through. None of them can break through.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes,” said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn’t sure at all. A phrase of Eddie’s occurred to him: All bets are off.
They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones that were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breath until they were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.
Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. “I don’t know, Roland,” she said, and he could hear her struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this…this here…” Her voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breath, struggling to get herself under control. “This all looks different. And the sounds…how they get in your head…”
He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door that had settled crookedly against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a sound that was both horrible and fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of stinking air. Roland had an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still could, maybe rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said, “Let’s see what’s up there. It’s a little brighter, anyway.”