by Stephen King
“Did you count the minute?” she asked. “Mississippi-one,
Mississippi-two, like that?”
He shook his head. “I just know. When a minute’s up, or an hour.”
“Bol-she-veckyl” she scoffed. ’You guessed!”
“If I’d guessed, would I have spoken after exactly one revolution of the hand?”
“You mought got lucky,” Detta said, and eyed him shrewdly with one eye mostly closed, an expression Roland detested. (But never said so; that would only cause Detta to goad him with it on those occasions when she peeked out.)
“Do you want to try it again?” he asked.
“No,” Susannah said, and sighed. “I take your word for it that your watch is keeping perfect time. And that means we’re not close to the Dark Tower. Not yet.”
“Perhaps not close enough to affect the watch, but closer than I’ve ever been,” Roland said quietly. “Comparatively speaking, we’re now almost in its shadow. Believe me, Susannah-I
know.”
“But-”
From over their heads came a cawing that was both harsh and oddly muffled: Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw! Susannah looked up and saw one of the huge blackbirds-the sort Roland had called Castle Rooks-flying overhead low enough so that they could hear the labored strokes of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limp strand of something yellowygreen.
To Susannah it looked like a piece of dead seaweed. Only not entirely dead.
She turned to Roland, looked at him widi excited eyes.
He nodded. “Devilgrass. Probably bringing it back to feather his mate’s nest. Certainly not for the babies to eat. Not that stuff.
But devilgrass always goes last when you’re walking into the Nowhere Lands, and always shows up first when you’re walking back out of them, as we are. As we finally are. Now listen to me,
Susannah, I’d have you listen, and I’d have you push that tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would I have you waste my time by telling me she’s not there when I can see her dancing the commala in your eyes.”
Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, as if she would protest. Then she looked away without saying anything. When she looked back at him again, she could no longer feel the presence of the one Roland had called “that tiresome bitch.”
And Roland must no longer have detected her presence, because he went on.
“I think it will soon look like we’re coming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to trust what you see-a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make for safety or civilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le Casse Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he may have left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking to be done, I want you to let me do it.”
“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked. “What are you holding back?”
“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him, a rare earnestness)
“It’s only a feeling, Susannah. We’re close to our goal now, no matter what the watch may say. Close to winning our way to the Dark Tower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just one rule with no exceptions: before victory comes temptation.
And the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”
Susannah shivered and put her arms around herself. “All I want is to be warm,” she said. “If nobody offers me a big load of firewood and a flannel union suit to cry off the Tower, I guess we’ll be all right awhile longer.”
Roland remembered one of Cort’s most serious maxims-
Never speak the worst aloud!-but kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away carefully and then rose, ready to move on.
But Susannah paused a moment longer. “I’ve dreamed of the other one,” she said. There was no need for her to say of whom she was speaking. “Three nights in a row, scuttering along our backtrail. Do you think he’s really there?”
“Oh yes,” Roland said. “And I think he’s got an empty belly.”
“Hungry, Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said, for she had also heard these words in her dream.
Susannah shivered again.
SEVEN
The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. It widened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here stood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop it now. The next day they came to die first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped wreck with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a flattened barn out back. With Roland’s help Susannah turned the sign over, and they could make out one word: LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come to know so well.
“I think the track we’ve been following was once a coachroad between Casde Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe,” he said. “It makes sense.”
They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads.
It was the outskirts of a town or village-perhaps even a city that had once spread around the Crimson King’s casde. But unlike Lud, there was very litde of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in the remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard whispering voices in the shadows. Roland identified these-with a matter-of-factness Susannah found eerie-as the voices of ghosts of what he called “housies,” and suggested they move back out into the street.
“I don’t believe they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow,” Roland said, and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual manner.
Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which they had tried to camp had a chill that she diought was worse than physical cold. The tilings they had heard whispering in there might be old, but she thought they were still hungry.
And so the three of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, beside Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a few degrees. They tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.
“Why?” Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate. “Why?”
“Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?”
“No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?”
“It won’t burn because it hates us,” Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. “This is his place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us. But… listen,
Susannah. Now that we’re on an actual road, still more paved than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?”
“Sure,” she said. “Anything’s got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel.”
So that was what they did-the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after that. She kept thinking, I’m gonna get sick,
I can’t go on like this without coming down with something, but she didn’t. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left of her lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.
Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needlegardens of rock, but Sus
annah had taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they could now read the occasional sign which proclaimed this to be THE KING’s WAY (with the eye, of course; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still on Badlands Avenue.
It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine what species of freakish people might once have lived here.
The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folk seen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses, Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed together under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had collapsed, and there was an unpleasantly organic look to these ruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her from some configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in the rubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.
On their fourth night on The King’s Way, they came to a major intersection where the main road made a crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the Beam. Ahead, less than a night’s walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it. In the chancy moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers bulged at the tops, as if wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways flew between them, crisscrossing above the courtyard in front of the casde proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She asked Roland about it.
“Water,” he said.
“What water? Do you have any idea?”
He shook his head. “But I’d not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying of thirst.”
“This place is bad,” she muttered, meaning not just the castle but the nameless village of leaning
(leering)
houses that had grown up all around it. “And Roland-it’s not empty.”
“Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy head-knocking or gnawing-then bid them away.”
“Will that work?”
“I’m not sure it will,” he admitted, “but I’ve heard that such things must be granted entry, and that they’re wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse.”
She had read Dracula as well as heard Pere Callahan’s story of Jerusalem’s Lot, and understood what Roland meant all too well.
He took her gendy by the shoulders and turned her away from the castle-which might not be naturally black after all, she had decided, but only tarnished by the years. Daylight would tell. For the present their way was lit by a cloud-scummed quarter-moon.
Several other roads led away from the place where they had stopped, most as crooked as broken fingers. The one Roland wanted her to look upon was straight, however, and Susannah realized it was the only completely straight street she had seen since the deserted village began to grow silently up around their way. It was smoothly paved rather than cobbled and pointed southeast, along the Path of die Beam. Above it flowed the moon-gilded clouds like boats in a procession.
“Does thee glimpse a darkish blur at the horizon, dear?” he murmured.
“Yes. A dark blur and a whitish band in front of it. What is it? Do you know?”
“I have an idea, but I’m not sure,” Roland said. “Let’s have us a rest here. Dawn’s not far off, and then we’ll both see. And besides, I don’t want to approach yonder castle at night.”
“If the Crimson King’s gone, and if the Path of the Beam lies that way-” She pointed. “Why do we need to go to his damn old casde at all?”
“To make sure he is gone, for one thing,” Roland said.
And we may be able to trap the one behind us. I doubt it-he’s wily-but there’s a chance. He’s also young, and the young are sometimes careless.”
“You’d kill him?”
Roland’s smile was wintry in the moonlight. Merciless.
“Without a moment’s hesitation,” said he.
EIGHT
In the morning Susannah woke from an uncomfortable doze amid the scattered supplies in the back of the rickshaw and saw Roland standing in the intersection and looking along the Path of the Beam. She got down, moving with great care because she was stiff and didn’t want to fall. She imagined her bones cold and brittle inside her flesh, ready to shatter like glass.
“What do you see?” he asked her. “Now that it’s light, what do you see over that way?”
The whitish band was snow, which did not surprise her given the fact that those were true uplands. What did surprise her-and gladdened her heart more than she would have believed possible-were the trees beyond the band of snow.
Green fir-trees. Living things.
“Oh, Roland, they look lovely!” she said. “Even with their feet in the snow, they look lovely! Don’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. He lifted her high and turned her back the way they had come. Beyond the nasty crowding suburb of dead houses she could see some of the Badlands they’d come through, all those crowding spines of rock broken by the occasional butte or mesa.
“Think of this,” he said. “Back yonder as you look is Fedic.
Beyond Fedic, Thunderclap. Beyond Thunderclap, the Callas and the forest that marks the borderland between Mid-World and End-World. Lud is further back that way, and River Crossing further still; the Western Sea and the great Mohaine Desert, too.
Somewhere back there, lost in the leagues and lost in time as well is what remains of In-World. The Baronies. Gilead. Places where even now there are people who remember love and light.”
“Yes,” she said, not understanding.
“That was the way the Crimson King turned to cast his petulance,” Roland said. “He meant to go the other way, ye must ken, to the Dark Tower, and even in his madness he knew better than to kill the land he must pass through, he and whatever band of followers he took with him.” He drew her toward him and kissed her forehead with a tenderness that made her feel like crying. “We three will visit his castle, and trap Mordred there if our fortune is good and his is ill. Then we’ll go on, and back into living lands. There’ll be wood for fires and game to provide fresh food and hides to wrap around us. Can you go on a little longer, dear? Can theeV
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Roland.”
She hugged him, and as she did, she looked toward the red castle. In the growing light she could see that the stone of which it had been made, although darkened by the years, had once been the color of spilled blood. This called forth a memory of her palaver with Mia on the Castle Discordia allure, a memory of steadily pulsing crimson light in the distance. Almost from where they now were, in fact.
Come to me now, if you ’d come at all, Susannah, Mia had told her. For the King can fascinate, even at a distance.
It was that pulsing red glow of which she had been speaking, but-
“It’s gone!” she said to Roland. “The red light from the castle-
Forge of the King, she called it! It’s gone! We haven’t seen it once in all this time!”
“No,” he said, and this time his smile was warmer. “I believe it must have stopped at the same time we ended the Breakers”
work. The Forge of the King has gone out, Susannah. Forever, if the gods are good. That much we have done, although it has cost us much.”
That afternoon they came to Le Casse Roi Russe, which turned out not to be entirely deserted, after all.
Chapter III:
THE CASTLE OF THE CRIMSON KING
ONE
They were a mile from the castle and the roar of the unseen river had become very loud when bunting and po
sters began to appear. The bunting consisted of red, white, and blue swags-the kind Susannah associated with Memorial Day parades and small-town Main Streets on the Fourth of July. On the facades of these narrow, secretive houses and the fronts of shops long closed and emptied from basement to attic, such decoration looked like rouge on the cheeks of a decaying corpse.
The faces on the posters were all too familiar to her.
Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge flashed V’s-for-victory and car-salesmen grins (NIXON/LODGE, BECAUSE THE WORK’s NOT DONE, these read). John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson stood with their arms around each other and their free hands raised.
Below their feet was the bold proclamation WE STAND ON THE EDGE OF A NEW FRONTIER.
“Any idea who won?” Roland asked over his shoulder.
Susannah was currently riding in Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, taking in the sights (and wishing for a sweater: even a light cardigan would do her just fine, by God).
“Oh, yes,” she said. There was no doubt in her mind that these posters had been mounted for her benefit. “Kennedy did.”
“He became your dinh?”
“Dinh of the entire United States. And Johnson got the job when Kennedy was gunned down.”
“Shot? Do you say so?” Roland was interested.
“Aye. Shot from hiding by a coward named Oswald.”
“And your United States was the most powerful country in the world.”
“Well, Russia was giving us a run for our money when you grabbed me by the collar and yanked me into Mid-World, but yes, basically.”
“And the folk of your country choose their dinh for themselves.
