by Stephen King
“There was some kind of battle here, wasn’t there?” she asked.
“Yes, I’d say so. A big one, long ago.” He sounded utterly whipped.
A sign lay facedown on the ground in front of the Quonset’s half-open door. Susannah insisted that he put her down so she could turn it over and read it. Roland did as she asked and then sat with his back propped against a rock, staring at Castle Discordia, which was now behind them. Two towers jutted into the blue, one whole and the other shattered off near what he judged had been the top. He concentrated on getting his breath back. The ground under him was very cold, and he knew already that their trek through the Badlands was going to be difficult.
Susannah, meanwhile, had lifted the sign. She held it with one hand and wiped off an ancient scrum of dirt with the other. The words she uncovered were in English, and gave her a deep chill:
THIS CHECKPOINT IS CLOSED.
FOREVER.
Below it, in red, seeming to glare at her, was the Eye of the King.
TWO
There was nothing in the Quonset’s main room but jumbles of equipment that had been blasted to ruin and more skeletons, none whole. In the adjoining storeroom, however, she found delightful surprises: shelves and shelves of canned food—more than they could possibly carry—and also more Sterno. (She did not think Roland would sneer at the idea of canned heat anymore, and she was right.) She poked her head out of the storeroom’s rear door almost as an afterthought, not expecting to find anything except maybe a few more skeletons, and there was one. The prize was the vehicle in which this loose agglomeration of bones was resting: a dogcart a bit like the one she’d found herself sitting in atop the castle, during her palaver with Mia. This one was both smaller and in much better shape. Instead of wood, the wheels were metal coated with thin rinds of some synthetic stuff. Pull-handles jutted from the sides, and she realized it wasn’t a dogcart at all, but a kind of rickshaw.
Git ready to pull yo sweetie, graymeat!
This was a typically nasty Detta Walker thought, but it surprised a laugh out of her, all the same.
“What have you found that’s amusing?” Roland called.
“You’ll see,” she called back, straining to keep Detta out of her voice, at least. In this she did not entirely succeed. “You gonna see soon enough, sho.”
THREE
There was a small motor at the rear of the rickshaw, but both saw at a glance it had been ages since it had run. In the storeroom Roland found a few simple tools, including an adjustable wrench. It was frozen with its jaw open, but an application of oil (in what was to Susannah a very familiar red-and-black 3-In-1 can) got it working again. Roland used the wrench to unbolt the motor from its mounts and then tumbled it off the side. While he worked and Susannah did what Daddy Mose would have called the heavy looking-on, Oy sat forty paces outside the arch through which they had exited, clearly on guard against the thing that had followed them in the dark.
“No more than fifteen pounds,” Roland said, wiping his hands on his jeans and looking at the tumbled motor, “but I reckon I’ll be glad we got rid of it by the time we’re done with this thing.”
“When do we start?” she asked.
“As soon as we’ve loaded as much canned stuff into the back as I think I can carry,” he said, and fetched a heavy sigh. His face was pale and stubbly. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, new lines carving his cheeks and descending to his jaw from the corners of his mouth. He looked as thin as a whip.
“Roland, you can’t! Not so soon! You’re done up!”
He gestured at Oy, sitting so patiently, and at the maw of darkness forty paces beyond him. “Do you want to be this close to that hole when dark comes?”
“We can build a fire—”
“It may have friends,” he said, “that aren’t shy of fire. While we were in yonder shaft, that thing wouldn’t have wanted to share us because it didn’t think it had to share. Now it might not care, especially if it’s vengeance-minded.”
“A thing like that can’t think. Surely not.” This was easier to believe now that they were out. But she knew she might change her mind once the shadows began to grow long and pool together.
“I don’t think it’s a chance we can afford to take,” Roland said.
She decided, very reluctantly, that he was right.
FOUR
Luckily for them, this first stretch of the narrow path winding into the Badlands was mostly level, and when they did come to an uphill stretch, Roland made no objection to Susannah’s getting out and hopping gamely along behind what she had dubbed Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi until they reached the crest of the hill. Little by little, Castle Discordia fell behind them. Roland kept going after the rocks had blocked the blasted tower from their view, but when the other one was gone as well, he pointed to a stony bower beside the path and said, “That’s where we’ll camp tonight, unless you have objections.”
She had none. They’d brought along enough bones and khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn’t last long. The bits of cloth would burn as rapidly as newspaper and the bones would be gone before the hands of Roland’s fancy new watch (which he had shown her with something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And tomorrow night there would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the cans. She was aware that things could have been ever so much worse—she put the daytime temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and they did have food—but she would have given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of longjohns.
“Probably we’ll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go along,” she said hopefully once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind). “Weeds … bushes … more bones … maybe even deadwood.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not on this side of the Crimson King’s castle. Not even devilgrass, which grows damned near anywhere in Mid-World.”
“You don’t know that. Not for sure.” She couldn’t bear thinking about days and days of unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging than a spring day in Central Park.
“I think he murdered this land when he darkened Thunderclap,” Roland mused. “It probably wasn’t much of a shake to begin with, and it’s sterile now. But count your blessings.” He reached over and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside her full lower lip. “A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten your skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you died.”
“Cancer? Radiation?”
Roland shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter. “Somewhere beyond the Crimson King’s castle we may come to grasslands and even forests again, but the grass will likely be buried under snow when we get there, for the season’s wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the day’s darkening so quickly.”
She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what came out was a sound of fear and weariness so real that it frightened her. Oy pricked up his ears and looked around at them. “Why don’t you cheer me up a little, Roland?”
“You need to know the truth,” he said. “We can get on as we are for a good long while, Susannah, but it isn’t going to be pleasant. We have food enough in yonder cart to keep us for a month or more, if we stretch it out … and we will. When we come again to land that’s alive, we’ll find animals even if there is snow. And that’s what I want. Not because we’ll be hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we’ll need the hides. I hope we won’t need them desperately, that it won’t be that near a thing, but—”
“But you’re afraid it will.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it will. For over a long period of time there’s little in life so disheartening as constant cold—not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I’m afraid we’re in for a very hard stretch. You’ll see.”
> She did.
FIVE
There’s little in life that’s so disheartening as constant cold.
The days weren’t so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they sometimes came to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock and between the occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying blue sky like the red fingers of otherwise buried stone giants. The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her chapped hands up to shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go completely numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn’t that bad. It was just deep enough to make their lives a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have sold her immortal soul during those unpleasant days and horrible nights? Sometimes she thought a single sweater would have purchased it; at other times she thought No, honey, you got too much self-respect, even now. Would you be willing to spend an eternity in hell—or maybe in the todash darkness—for a single sweater? Surely not!
Well, maybe not. But if the devil tempting her were to throw in a pair of earmuffs—
And it would have taken so little, really, to make them comfortable. She thought of this constantly. They had the food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals along the path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands.
Badlands. She had hours and days and, ultimately, weeks to meditate on that word. What made lands bad? Poisoned water? The water out here wasn’t sweet, not by any means, but it wasn’t poisoned, either. Lack of food? They had food, although she guessed it might become a problem later on, if they didn’t find more. In the meantime she was getting almighty tired of corned beef hash, not to mention raisins for breakfast and raisins if you wanted dessert. Yet it was food. Body-gasoline. What made the Badlands bad when you had food and water? Watching the sky turn first gold and then russet in the west; watching it turn purple and then starshot black in the east. She watched the days end with increasing dread: the thought of another endless night, the three of them huddled together while the wind whined and twined its way through the rocks and the stars glared down. Endless stretches of cold purgatory while your feet and fingers buzzed and you thought If I only had a sweater and a pair of gloves, I could be comfortable. That’s all it would take, just a sweater and a pair of gloves. Because it’s really not that cold.
Exactly how cold did it get after sundown? Never below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, she knew, because the water she put out for Oy never froze solid. She guessed that the temperature dropped to around forty in the hours between midnight and dawn; on a couple of nights it might have fallen into the thirties, because she saw tiny spicules of ice around the edge of the pot that served Oy as a dish.
She began to eye his fur coat. At first she told herself this was nothing but a speculative exercise, a way of passing the time— exactly how hot did the bumbler’s metabolism run, and exactly how warm did that coat (that thick, luxuriantly thick, that amazingly thick coat) keep him? Little by little she recognized her feelings for what they were: jealousy that muttered in Detta’s voice. L’il buggah doan feel no pain after the sun go down, do he? No, not him! You reckon you could git two sets o’ mittens outta that hide?
She would thrust these thoughts away, miserable and horrified, wondering if there was any lower limit to the human spirit at its nasty, calculating, self-serving worst, not wanting to know.
Deeper and deeper that cold worked into them, day by day and night by night. It was like a splinter. They would sleep huddled together with Oy between them, then turn so the sides of them that had been facing the night were turned inward again. Real restorative sleep never lasted long, no matter how tired they were. When the moon began to wax, brightening the dark, they spent two weeks walking at night and sleeping in the daytime. That was a little better.
The only wildlife they saw were large black birds either flying against the southeastern horizon or gathered in a sort of convention atop the mesas. If the wind was right, Roland and Susannah could hear their shrill, gabby conversation.
“You think those things’d be any good to eat?” Susannah asked the gunslinger once. The moon was almost gone and they had reverted to traveling during the daytime so they could see any potential hazards (on several occasions deep crevasses had crossed the path, and once they came upon a sinkhole that appeared to be bottomless).
“What do you think?” Roland asked her.
“Prob’ly not, but I wouldn’t mind tryin one and finding out.” She paused. “What do you reckon they live on?”
Roland only shook his head. Here the path wound through a fantastic petrified garden of needle-sharp rock formations. Further off, a hundred or more black, crowlike birds either circled a flat-topped mesa or sat on its edge looking in Roland and Susannah’s direction, like a beady-eyed panel of jurors.
“Maybe we ought to make a detour,” she said. “See if we can’t find out.”
“If we lost the path, we might not be able to find it again,” Roland said.
“That’s bullshit! Oy would—”
“Susannah, I don’t want to hear any more about it!” He spoke in a sharply angry tone she had never heard before. Angry, yes, she had heard Roland angry many times. But there was a pettiness in this, a sulkiness that worried her. And frightened her a little, as well.
They went on in silence for the next half an hour, Roland pulling Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and Susannah riding. Then the narrow path (Badlands Avenue, she’d come to call it) tilted upward and she hopped down, catching up with him and then going along beside. For such forays she’d torn his Old Home Days tee-shirt in half and wore it wrapped around her hands. It protected her from sharp stones, and also warmed her fingers, at least a little.
He glanced down at her, then back at the path ahead. His lower lip was stuck out a bit and Susannah thought that surely he couldn’t know how absurdly willful that expression was—like a three-year-old who has been denied a trip to the beach. He couldn’t know and she wouldn’t tell him. Later, maybe, when they could look back on this nightmare and laugh. When they could no longer remember what, exactly, was so terrible about a night when the temperature was forty-one degrees and you lay awake, shivering on the cold ground, watching the occasional meteor scrape cold fire across the sky, thinking Just a sweater, that’s all I need. Just a sweater and I’d go along as happy as a parakeet at feeding time. And wondering if there was enough hide on Oy to make them each a pair of underdrawers and if killing him might not actually be doing the poor little beastie a favor; he’d just been so sad since Jake passed into the clearing.
“Susannah,” Roland said. “I was sharp with you just now, and I cry your pardon.”
“There’s no need,” she said.
“I think there is. We’ve enough problems without making problems between us. Without making resentments between us.”
She was quiet. Looking up at him as he looked off into the southeast, at the circling birds.
“Those rooks,” he said.
She was quiet, waiting.
“In my childhood, we sometimes called them Gan’s Blackbirds. I told you and Eddie about how my friend Cuthbert and I spread bread for the birds after the cook was hanged, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“They were birds exactly like those, named Castle Rooks by some. Never Royal Rooks, though, for they were scavenger birds. You asked what yonder rooks live on. Could be they’re scavenging in the yards and streets of his castle, now that he’s departed.”
“Le Casse Roi Russe, or Roi Rouge, or whatever you call it.”
“Aye. I don’t say for sure, but …”
Roland didn’t finish and
didn’t need to. After that she kept an eye on the birds, and yes, they seemed to be both coming and going from the southeast. The birds might mean that they were making progress after all. It wasn’t much, but enough to buoy her spirits for the rest of that day and deep into another shivering rotten-cold night.
SIX
The following morning, as they were eating another cold breakfast in another fireless camp (Roland had promised that tonight they would use some of the Sterno and have food that was at least warm), Susannah asked if she could look at the watch he had been given by the Tet Corporation. Roland passed it over to her willingly enough. She looked long at the three siguls cut into the cover, especially the Tower with its ascending spiral of windows. Then she opened it and looked inside. Without looking up at Roland she said, “Tell me again what they said to you.”
“They were passing on what one of their good-minds told them. An especially talented one, by their accounts, although I don’t remember his name. According to him, the watch may stop when we near the Dark Tower, or even begin to run backward.”
“Hard to imagine a Patek Philippe running backward,” she said. “According to this, it’s eight-sixteen AM or PM back in New York. Here it looks about six-thirty AM, but I don’t guess that means much, one way or the other. How’re we supposed to know if this baby is running fast or slow?”
Roland had stopped storing goods in his gunna and was considering her question. “Do you see the tiny hand at the bottom? The one that runs all by himself?”
“The second-hand, yes.”
“Tell me when he’s straight up.”
She looked at the second-hand racing around in its own circle, and when it was in the noon position, she said, “Right now.”
Roland was hunkered down, a position he could accomplish easily now that the pain in his hip was gone. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his knees. Each breath he exhaled emerged in a thin mist. Susannah tried not to look at this; it was as if the hated cold had actually grown strong enough to appear before them, still ghostlike but visible.
