by Stephen King
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 Iain’t goan try nohardert ’change his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too!
Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.
EIGHTEEN
Bvit 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 gendy 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 gendy. “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 litde 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 midafternoon 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 sureT
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 f
or 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.1” 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 third 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?
All, children are such dreamers.
It didn’t happen, of course, but there had been much more to watch. Some of it was hard to see, though. Because it wasn’t just excitement that made the binoculars tremble. He was dressed warmly now, in layers of Dandelo’s hume clothes, but he was still cold. Except when he was hot. And either way, hot or cold, he trembled like a toothless old gaffer in a chimney corner.
This state of affairs had been growing gradually worse since he left Joe Collins’s house behind. Fever roared in his bones like a blizzard wind. Mordred was no longer a-hungry (for Mordred no longer had an appetite), but Mordred was a-sick, a-sick, a-sick.
In truth, he was afraid Mordred might be a-dying.
Nonetheless he watched Roland’s party with great interest, and once the fire was replenished, he saw even better. Saw the door come into being, although he could not read the symbols there writ upon. He understood that the Artist had somehow drawn it into being-what a godlike talent that was! Mordred longed to eat him just on the chance such a talent might be transmittable! He doubted it, the spiritual side of cannibalism was greatly overrated, but what harm in seeing for one’s self?
He watched their palaver. He saw-and also understood-her plea to the Artist and the Mutt, her whining entreaties
(come with me so I don’t have to go alone, come on, be a sport, in fact be a couple of sports, oh boo-hoo)
and rejoiced in her sorrow and fury when the plea was rejected by both boy and beast; Mordred rejoiced even though he knew it would make his own job harder. (A little harder, anyway; how much trouble could a mute young man and a billybumbler really give him, once he changed his shape and made his move?) For a moment he thought that, in her anger, she might shoot Old White Daddy with his own gun, and that Mordred did mtf want. Old White Daddy was meant to be his. The voice from the Dark Tower had told him so. A-sick he surely was, a-dying he might be, but Old White Daddy was still meant to be his meal, not the Blackbird Mommy’s. Why, she’d leave the meat to rot without taking a single bite! But she didn’t shoot him. Instead she kissedhim… Mordred didn’t want to see that, it made him feel sicker than ever, and so he put the binoculars aside. He lay in the grass amid a little clump of alders, trembling, hot and cold, trying not to puke (he had spent the entire previous day puking and shitting, it seemed, until the muscles of his midsection ached with the strain of sending such heavy traffic in two directions at once and nothing came up his throat but thick, mucusy strings and nothing out of his backside but brown stew and great hollow farts), and when he looked through the binoculars again, it was just in time to see the back end of the little electric cart disappear as the Blackbird Mommy drove it through the door. Something swirled out around it. Dust, maybe, but he thought snow. There was also singing. The sound of it made him feel almost as sick as seeing her kiss Old White Gunslinger Daddy. Then the door slammed shut behind her and the singing was gone and the gunslinger just sat there near it, with his face in his hands, boohoo, sob-sob.
The bumbler went to him and put its long snout on one of his boots as if to offer comfort, how sweet, how puking sweet. By then it was dawn, and Mordred dozed a little. When he woke up, it was to the sound of Old White Daddy’s voice. Mordred’s hiding place was downwind, and the words came to him clearly:
“Oy? Will’ee not have at least a bite?” The bumbler would not, however, and the gunslinger had scattered the food that had been meant for the little fvirry houken. Later, aft
er they moved on (Old White Gunslinger Daddy pulling the cart the robot had made for them, plodding slowly along the ruts of Tower Road with his head down and his shoulders all a-slump), Mordred crept to the campsite. He did indeed eat some of the scattered food-surely it had not been poisoned if Roland had hoped it would go down the bumbler’s gullet-but he stopped after only three or four chunks of meat, knowing that if he went on eating, his guts would spew everything back out, both north and south.
He couldn’t have that. If he didn’t hold onto at least some nourishment, he would be too weak to follow them. And he must follow, had to stay close a little while longer. It would have to be tonight. It would have to be, because tomorrow Old White Daddy would reach the Dark Tower, and then it would almost certainly be too late. His heart told him so. Mordred plodded as Roland had, but even more slowly. Every now and then he would double over as cramps seized him and his human shape wavered, that blackness rising and receding under his skin, his heavy coat bulging restlessly as the other legs tried to burst free, then hanging slack again as he willed them back inside, gritting his teeth and groaning with effort. Once he shit a pint or so of stinky brown fluid in his pants, and once he managed to get his trousers down, and he cared little either way. No one had invited him to the Reap Ball, ha-ha! Invitation lost in the mail, no doubt! Later, when it came time to attack, he would let the little Red King free. But if it happened now, he was almost positive he wouldn’t be able to change back again. He wouldn’t have the strength. The spider’s faster metabolism would fan the sickness the way a strong wind fans a low ground-fire into a forest-gobbling blaze. What was killing him slowly would kill him rapidly, instead. So he fought it, and by afternoon he felt a little better. The pulse from the Tower was growing rapidly now, growing in strength and urgency. So was his Red Daddy’s voice, urging him on, urging him to stay within striking distance.
