The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  But before them, there was the old man.

  “Rando,” he said. “Rando Thoughtful.”

  The old man jerked and mumbled and opened his eyes. For a moment he looked at the scrawny boy standing before him with a total lack of understanding. Then his rheumy eyes filled with fright.

  “Mordred, son of Los’,” he said, trying a smile. “Hile to you, King that will be!” He made a shuffling gesture with his legs, then seemed to realize that he was sitting down and it wouldn’t do. He attempted to find his feet, fell back with a bump that amused the boy (amusement had been hard to come by in the Badlands, and he welcomed it), then tried again. This time he managed to get up.

  “I see no bodies except for those of two fellows who look like they died even older than you,” Mordred remarked, looking around in exaggerated fashion. “I certainly see no dead gunslingers, of either the long-leg or shor’-leg variety.”

  “You say true—and I say thankya, o’course I do—but I can explain that, sai, and quite easily—”

  “Oh, but wait! Hold thy explanation, excellent though I’m sure it is! Let me guess, instead! Is it that the snakes have bound the gunslinger and his lady, long fat snakes, and you’ve had them removed into yonder castle for safekeeping?”

  “My lord—”

  “If so,” Mordred continued, “there must have been an almighty lot of snakes in thy basket, for I still see many out here. Some appear to be dining on what should have been my supper.” Although the severed, rotting limbs in the basket would still be his supper—part of it, anyway—Mordred gave the old fellow a reproachful look. “Have the gunslingers been put away, then?”

  The old man’s look of fright departed and was replaced by one of resignation. Mordred found this downright infuriating. What he wanted to see in old sai Thoughtful’s face was not fright, and certainly not resignation, but hope. Which Mordred would snatch away at his leisure. His shape wavered. For a moment the old man saw the unformed blackness which lurked beneath, and the many legs. Then it was gone and the boy was back. For the moment, at least.

  May I not die screaming, the former Austin Cornwell thought. At least grant me that much, you gods that be. May I not die screaming in the arms of yonder monstrosity.

  “You know what’s happened here, young sai. It’s in my mind, and so it’s in yours. Why not take the mess in that basket—the snakes, too, do ya like em—and leave an old man to what little life he has left? For your father’s sake, if not your own. I served him well, even at the end. I could have simply hunkered in the castle and let them go their course. But I didn’t. I tried.”

  “You had no choice,” Mordred replied from his end of the bridge. Not knowing if it was true or not. Nor caring. Dead flesh was only nourishment. Living flesh and blood still rich with the air of a man’s last breath…ah, that was something else. That was fine dining! “Did he leave me a message?”

  “Aye, you know he did.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Why don’t you just pick it out of my mind?”

  Again there came that fluttering, momentary change. For a moment it was neither a boy nor a boy-sized spider standing on the far end of the bridge but something that was both at the same time. Sai Thoughtful’s mouth went dry even while the drool that had escaped during his nap still gleamed on his chin. Then the boy-version of Mordred solidified again inside his torn and rotting coat.

  “Because it pleases me to hear it from your drooping old stew-hole,” he told Thoughtful.

  The old man licked his lips. “All right; may it do ya fine. He said that he’s crafty while you’re young and without so much as a sip of guile. He said that if you don’t stay back where you belong, he’ll have your head off your shoulders. He said he’d like to hold it up to your Red Father as he stands trapped upon his balcony.”

  This was quite a bit more than Roland actually said (as we should know, having been there), and more than enough for Mordred.

  Yet not enough for Rando Thoughtful. Perhaps only ten days before it would have accomplished the old man’s purpose, which was to goad the boy into killing him quickly. But Mordred had seasoned in a hurry, and now withstood his first impulse to simply bolt across the bridge into the castle courtyard, changing as he charged, and tearing Rando Thoughtful’s head from his body with the swipe of one barbed leg.

  Instead he peered up at the rooks—hundreds of them, now—and they peered back at him, as intent as pupils in a classroom. The boy made a fluttering gesture with his arms, then pointed at the old man. The air was at once filled with the rising whir of wings. The King’s Minister turned to flee, but before he’d gotten a single step, the rooks descended on him in an inky cloud. He threw his arms up to protect his face as they lit on his head and shoulders, turning him into a scarecrow. This instinctive gesture did no good; more of them alit on his upraised arms until the very weight of the birds forced them down. Bills nipped and needled at the old man’s face, drawing blood in tiny tattoo stipples.

  “No!” Mordred shouted. “Save the skin for me…but you may have his eyes.”

  It was then, as the eager rooks tore Rando Thoughtful’s eyes from their living sockets, that the ex-Minister of State uttered the rising howl Roland and Susannah heard as they neared the edge of Castle-town. The birds who couldn’t find a roosting-place hung around him in a living thunderhead. They turned him on his levitating heels and carried him toward the changeling, who had now advanced to the center of the bridge and squatted there. The boots and rotted pillowtick coat had been left behind for the nonce on the town side of the bridge; what waited for sai Thoughtful, reared up on its back legs, forelegs pawing the air, red mark on its hairy belly all too visible, was Dan-Tete, the Little Red King.

  The man floated to his fate, shrieking and eyeless. He thrust his hands out in front of him, making warding-off gestures, and the spider’s front legs seized one of them, guided it into the bristling maw of its mouth, and bit it off with a candy-cane crunch.

  Sweet!

  Eight

  That night, beyond the last of the oddly narrow, oddly unpleasant townhouses, Roland stopped in front of what had probably been a smallhold farm. He stood facing the ruin of the main building, sniffing.

  “What, Roland? What?”

  “Can you smell the wood of that place, Susannah?”

  She sniffed. “I can, as a matter of fact—what of it?”

  He turned to her, smiling. “If we can smell it, we can burn it.”

  This turned out to be correct. They had trouble kindling the fire, even aided by Roland’s slyest tricks of trailcraft and half a can of Sterno, but in the end they succeeded. Susannah sat as close to it as she could, turning at regular intervals in order to toast both sides equally, relishing the sweat that popped out first on her face and her breasts, then on her back. She had forgotten what it was to be warm, and went on feeding wood to the flames until the campfire was a roaring bonfire. To animals in the open lands further along the Path of the healing Beam, that fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object—to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father’s sake—but he didn’t. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.

  “Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?” he asked her at last.

  She nodded. “If I have to.”

  “Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold,” he said. “And while I can’t promise you we’ll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don’t believe it’ll be any longer than two.”

  “You think it’ll be easier to take game if we don’t build a fire, don’t you?”

  Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.

  “Will there be game as early as day after t
omorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  He considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t say—but I do.”

  “Can you smell it?”

  “No.”

  “Touch their minds?”

  “It’s not that, either.”

  She let it go. “Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?”

  He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon’s breath. “They’ll not come close to thy bonfire.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we’ll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can persuade them to go.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  He shook his head yet again, although he thought he knew the answer to her question. What he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say so.

  “Lie down, Susannah,” he said. “Take your rest. I’ll watch until midnight, then wake you.”

  “So now we keep a watch,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Is he watching us?”

  Roland wasn’t sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for he’d have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of their companionship, as well. Half-mother and White Father, with their backs turned to him.

  “It’s likely,” he said.

  She started to lie down, then stopped. She touched the sore beside her mouth. “This isn’t a pimple, Roland.”

  “No?” He sat quiet, watching her.

  “I had a friend in college who got one just like it,” Susannah said. “It’d bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor—a special kind we call a dermatologist—and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its roots in a little deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too.”

  Roland was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor. He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself. Mordred, as well.

  “We don’t have no novocaine, Baby-Boots,” Detta Walker said, “and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell you, you goan whip out yo’ knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off’n me. Goan do it faster than yon bum’blah c’n snatch a fly out de air. You unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?”

  “Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest.”

  She lay over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened her eyes and gave him

  (I watchin you, white boy)

  a glare. Roland nodded to her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes closed, they didn’t open again.

  He had promised to wake her at midnight, but let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch said was one o’ the clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around him and his head in his arms.

  And does his mouth, still caked with sai Thoughtful’s blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but once, the milk it never tasted?

  Roland didn’t know. Didn’t particularly want to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly stone.

  Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento’s artificial sun and those he’d seen in Stephen King’s world. That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland’s hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.

  Chapter IV:

  Hides

  One

  They had to go fireless three nights instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of Susannah’s life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you’d be lying from then on? Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?

  Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse. She came to dread every light breath of breeze from the snowlands to the east and south. It was both terrible and oddly humbling to realize how easily physical discomfort could take control, expanding like poison gas until it owned all the floor-space, took over the entire playing field. Grief? Loss? What were those things when you could feel cold on the march, moving in from your fingers and toes, crawling up your motherfucking nose, and moving where? Toward the brain, do it please ya. And toward the heart. In the grip of cold like that, grief and loss were nothing but words. No, not even that. Only sounds. So much meaningless quack as you sat shuddering under the stars, waiting for a morning that would never come.

  What made it worse was knowing there were potential bonfires all around them, for they’d reached the live region Roland called “the undersnow.” This was a series of long, grassy slopes (most of the grass now white and dead) and shallow valleys where there were isolated stands of trees, and brooks now plugged with ice. Earlier, in daylight, Roland had pointed out several holes in the ice and told her they’d been made by deer. He pointed out several piles of scat, as well. In daylight such sign had been interesting, even hopeful. But in this endless ditch of night, listening to the steady low click of her chattering teeth, it meant nothing. Eddie meant nothing. Jake, neither. The Dark Tower meant nothing, nor did the bonfire they’d had out the outskirts of Castle-town. She could remember the look of it, but the feel of heat warming her skin until it brought an oil of sweat was utterly lost. Like a person who has died for a moment or two and has briefly visited some shining afterlife, she could only say that it had been wonderful.

  Roland sat with his arms around her, sometimes voicing a dry, harsh cough. Susannah thought he might be getting sick, but this thought also had no power. Only the cold.

  Once—shortly before dawn finally began to stain the sky in the east, this was—she saw orange lights swirl-dancing far ahead, past the place where the snow began. She asked Roland if he had any idea what they were. She had no real interest, but hearing her voice reassured her that she wasn’t dead. Not yet, at least.

  “I think they’re hobs.”

  “W-What are th-they?” She now stuttered and stammered everything.

  “I don’t know how to explain them to you,” he said. “And there’s really no need. You’ll see them in time. Right now if you listen, you’ll hear something closer and more interesting.”

  At first she heard only the sigh of the wind. Then it dropped and her ears picked up the dry swish of the grass below as something walked through it. This was fol
lowed by a low crunching sound. Susannah knew exactly what it was: a hoof stamping through thin ice, opening the running water to the cold world above. She also knew that in three or four days’ time she might be wearing a coat made from the animal that was now drinking nearby, but this also had no meaning. Time was a useless concept when you were sitting awake in the dark, and in constant pain.

  Had she thought she had been cold before? That was quite funny, wasn’t it?

  “What about Mordred?” she asked. “Is he out there, do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does he feel the cold like we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t stand much more of this, Roland—I really can’t.”

  “You won’t have to. It’ll be dawn soon, and I expect we’ll have a fire tomorrow come dark.” He coughed into his fist, then put his arm back around her. “You’ll feel better once we’re up and in the doings. Meantime, at least we’re together.”

  Two

  Mordred was as cold as they were, every bit, and he had no one.

  He was close enough to hear them, though: not the actual words, but the sound of their voices. He shuddered uncontrollably, and had lined his mouth with dead grass when he became afraid that Roland’s sharp ears might pick up the sound of his chattering teeth. The railwayman’s jacket was no help; he had thrown it away when it had fallen into so many pieces that he could no longer hold it together. He’d worn the arms of it out of Castle-town, but then they had fallen to pieces as well, starting at the elbows, and he’d cast them into the low grass beside the old road with a petulant curse. He was only able to go on wearing the boots because he’d been able to weave long grass into a rough twine. With it he’d bound what remained of them to his feet.