by Stephen King
“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 right, 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 dan-tete-tet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shinnaro 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.”
For a wild moment she thought she would. That she would simply turn the little electric cart from the door—which was one-sided and made no promises—and go with him to the Dark Tower. Another day would do it; they could camp at mid-afternoon and thus arrive tomorrow at sunset, as he wanted.
Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The young man holding out the cup of hot chocolate—the good kind, mit schlag.
“No,” she said softly. “I’ll take my chance and go.”
For a moment she thought he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his anger—no, his despair—broke in a painful burst. “But you can’t be sure! Susannah, what if the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even when the door’s open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll right through and into todash space?”
“Then I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love.”
“And that might work,” said he, speaking in the bitterest voice she had ever heard. “For the first ten years…or twenty…or even a hundred. And then? What about the rest of eternity? Think of Oy! Do you think he’s forgotten Jake? Never! Never! Never in your life! Never in his! He senses something wrong! Susannah, don’t. I beg you, don’t go. I’ll get on my knees, if that will help.” And to her horror, he began to do exactly that.
“It won’t,” she said. “And if this is to be my last sight of you—my heart says it is—then don’t let it be of you on your knees. You’re not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven, never were, and I don’t want to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as you were in Calla Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill.”
He got up and came to her. For a moment she thought he meant to restrain her by force, and she was afraid. But he only put his hand on her arm for a moment, and then took it away. “Let me ask you again, Susannah. Are you sure?”
She conned her heart and saw that she was. She understood the risks, but yes—she was. And why? Because Roland’s way was the way of the gun. Roland’s way was death for those who rode or walked beside him. He had proved it over and over again, since the earliest days of his quest—no, even before, since overhearing Hax the cook plotting treachery and thus assuring his death by the rope. It was all for the good (for what he called the White), she had no doubt of it, but Eddie still lay in his grave in one world and Jake in another. She had no doubt that much the same fate was waiting for Oy, and for poor Patrick.
Nor would their deaths be long in coming.
“I’m sure,” said she.
“All right. Will you give me a kiss?”
She took him by the arm and pulled him down and put her lips on his. When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death.
But not for you, gunslinger, she thought. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may I do fine.
She was the one who broke their kiss.
“Can you open the door for me?” she asked.
Roland went to it, and took the knob in his hand, and the knob turned easily within his grip.
Cold air puffed out, strong enough to blow Patrick’s long hair back, and with it came a few flakes of snow. She could see grass that was still green beneath light frost, and a path, and an iron fence. Voices were singing “What Child Is This,” just as in her dream.
It could be Central Park. Yes, it could be; Central Park of some other world along the axis, perhaps, and not the one she came from, but close enough so that in time she would know no difference.
Or perhaps it was, as he said, a glammer.
Perhaps it was the todash darkness.
“It could be a trick,” he said, most certainly reading her mind.
“Life is a trick, love a glammer,” she replied. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path.”
“As you say so, let it be so,” he told her. He put out one leg, the rundown heel of his boot planted in the earth, and bowed to her. Oy had begun to weep, but he sat firmly beside the gunslinger’s left boot. “Goodbye, my dear.”
“Goodbye, Roland.” Then she faced ahead, took in a deep breath, and twisted the little cart’s throttle. It rolled smoothly forward.
“Wait!” Roland cried, but she never turned, nor looked at him again. She rolled through the door. It slammed shut behind her at once with a flat, declamatory clap he knew all too well, one he’d dreamed of ever since his long and feverish walk along the edge of the Western Sea. The sound of the singing was gone and now there was only the lonely sound of the prairie wind.
Roland of Gilead sat in front of the door, which already looked tired and unimportant. It would never open again. He put his face in his hands. It occurred to him that if he had never loved them, he would never have felt so alone as this. Yet of all his many regrets, the re-opening of his heart was not among them, even now.
Nineteen
Later—because there’s always a later, isn’t there?—he made breakfast and forced himself to eat his share. Patrick ate heartily, then withdrew to do his necessary while Roland packed up.
There was a t
hird plate, and it was still full. “Oy?” Roland asked, tipping it toward the billy-bumbler. “Will’ee not have at least a bite?”
Oy looked at the plate, then backed away two firm steps. Roland nodded and tossed away the uneaten food, scattering it into the grass. Mayhap Mordred would come along in good time, and find something to his liking.
At mid-morning they moved on, Roland pulling Ho Fat II and Patrick walking along beside with his head hung low. And soon the beat of the Tower filled the gunslinger’s head again. Very close now. That steady, pulsing power drove out all thoughts of Susannah, and he was glad. He gave himself to the steady beating and let it sweep away all his thoughts and all his sorrow.
Commala-come-come, sang the Dark Tower, now just over the horizon. Commala-come-come, gunslinger may ya come.
Commala-come-Roland, the journey’s nearly done.
Chapter II:
Mordred
One
The dan-tete was watching when the long-haired fellow they were now traveling with grabbed Susannah’s shoulder to point out the dancing orange hobs in the distance. Mordred watched as she whirled, pulling one of the White Daddy’s big revolvers. For a moment the far-seeing glass eyes he’d found in the house on Odd’s Lane trembled in Mordred’s hand, that was how hard he was rooting for his Blackbird Mommy to shoot the Artist. How the guilt would have bitten into her! Like the blade of a dull hatchet, yar! It was even possible that, overcome by the horror of what she had done, she’d’ve put the barrel of the gun to her own head and pulled the trigger a second time, and how would Old White Daddy like waking up to that?