The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  Five

  Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it…and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

  When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.

  When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.

  He didn’t draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.

  Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gentle touch. The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully. Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.

  The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.

  “What do you see?” she asked him.

  “What do you see?” he asked in turn.

  She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. “Well,” she said, “there’s Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there—oh my goodness!” She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. “That wasn’t there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn’t. That one’s in our world, Roland—we call it the Big Dipper!”

  He nodded. “And once, according to the oldest books in my father’s library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia’s Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again.” He turned to her, smiling. “Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!”

  Six

  Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.

  Seven

  She’s in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not “Silent Night” or “What Child Is This” but the Rice Song: “Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-come-commala!” She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and

  (no twins here)

  she is comforted.

  She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.

  Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

  Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

  None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It’s a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob’s of solid gold, and filigreed with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber #2’s, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.

  Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It’s the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream. “Here,” he says, “I brought you hot chocolate.”

  She ignores the outstretched cup. She’s fascinated by the door. “It’s like the ones along the beach, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “Yes,” Eddie says.

  “No,” Jake says at the same time.

  “You’ll figure it out,” they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.

  She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland drew them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER. Writ upon this one is . And below that:

  THE ARTIST

  She turns back to them and they are gone.

  Central Park is gone.

  She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.

  On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: “Time’s almost up…hurry…”

  Eight

  She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him…and best I do it before I can s’much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon. But where do I go? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?

  This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though…Patrick was a…well, a pencil-slinger. Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn’t kill much with an Eberhard-Faber unless it was very sharp.

  She’d sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadn’t noticed. And she didn’t want him to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she’d decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whistling sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on the bottom of the plate, the attachment that looked so much like Patrick’s pencil sharpener. She thought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that?

  There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of the symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.

  Time’s almost up. Hurry.

  The next day her tears began.

  Nine

  There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open. Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then the great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breath and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.

  “Roland!” she said. “Yonder’s a herd of buffalo, or maybe they’re bison! Sure as death n taxes!”

  “Aye, do you say so?” Roland asked, with only passing interest. “We called em bannock, in the long ago. It’s a good-sized herd.”

  Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He sw
itched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding the yellow barrel against his palm and shading with the tip. She could almost smell the dust boiling up from the herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Although it seemed to her that he’d taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own. That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes.

  “There hasn’t been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years,” she said.

  “Aye?” Still only polite interest. “But they’re in plenty here, I should say. If a little tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let’s take a couple. I’d like to taste some fresh meat that isn’t deer. Would you?”

  She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man she’d believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she?

  She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the ever-strengthening beat-beat-beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself.

  Beat-beat-beat.

  Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.

  That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight.

  “I think he’s out there someplace,” she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. “Watch well.”

  “I will,” he said. “And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast.”

  “You can count on it,” said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep.

  And dreamed.

  Ten

  The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing “Come Go With Me,” the old Del-Vikings hit), Jake (I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT’S A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesn’t offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies. That is the main difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps it’s both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward.

  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?”

  H
e 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?”