Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  “That’s someone below us, in the basement,” Roland said.

  “I know. And I think I know who it is.”

  He nodded.

  She was looking at him steadily. “It all fits, doesn’t it? It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and we’ve put in all but the last few pieces.”

  The cry came again, thin and lost. The cry of someone who was next door to dead. They left the bathroom, drawing their guns. Susannah didn’t think they’d need them this time.

  FIVE

  The bug that had made itself look like a jolly old joker named Joe Collins lay where it had lain, but Oy had backed off a step or two. Susannah didn’t blame him. Dandelo was beginning to stink, and little trickles of white stuff were beginning to ooze through its decaying carapace. Nevertheless, Roland bade the bumbler remain where he was, and keep watch.

  The cry came again when they reached the kitchen, and it was louder, but at first they saw no way down to the cellar. Susannah moved slowly across the cracked and dirty linoleum, looking for a hidden trapdoor. She was about to tell Roland there was nothing when he said, “Here. Behind the cold-box.”

  The refrigerator was no longer a top-of-the-line Amana with an icemaker in the door but a squat and dirty thing with the cooling machinery on top, in a drum-shaped casing. Her mother had had one like it when Susannah had been a little girl who answered to the name of Odetta, but her mother would have died before ever allowing her own to be even a tenth as dirty. A hundredth.

  Roland moved it aside easily, for Dandelo, sly monster that he’d been, had put it on a little wheeled platform. She doubted that he got many visitors, not way out here in End-World, but he had been prepared to keep his secrets if someone did drop by. As she was sure folken did, every once and again. She imagined that few if any got any further along their way than the little hut on Odd Lane.

  The stairs leading down were narrow and steep. Roland felt around inside the door and found a switch. It lit two bare bulbs, one halfway down the stairs and one below. As if in response to the light, the cry came again. It was full of pain and fear, but there were no words in it. The sound made her shiver.

  “Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are!” Roland called.

  No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and whooped, driving snow against the side of the house so hard that it sounded like sand.

  “Come to where we can see you, or we’ll leave you where you are!” Roland called.

  The inhabitant of the cellar didn’t come into the scant light but cried out again, a sound that was loaded with woe and terror and—Susannah feared it—madness.

  He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. “Go first. I’ll back your play, if you have to make one.”

  “’Ware the steps that you don’t take a tumble,” he said in the same low voice.

  She nodded again and made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand: Go on, go on.

  That raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslinger’s lips. He went down the stairs with the barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for a moment he looked so like Jake Chambers that she could have wept.

  SIX

  The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks. Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind.

  Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zigzag aisle with crates stacked head-high on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled TEXAS INSTRUMENTS and another stack with HO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE CO. stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their long-abandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise.

  Ahead of her, Roland stopped. “Tears of my mother,” he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal’s living eyes out of their sockets.

  She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.

  In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar — the southeast corner, if she had her directions right—there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it … but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an Sshaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach— left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt—was a large and old-fashioned

  (dad-a-chum dad-a-chee)

  silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do.

  Something like that was in Patrick Danville’s eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!

  Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danville’s hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long—it hung all the way to his shoulders—but there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.

  “No offense, Patrick,” Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. “Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?”

  The scrawny thing in the dirty jeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder: I-YEEE! I-YOWK! IYEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful head-banging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, long-fingered hands again, as if for succor.

  Roland looked to Susannah.

  She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing in the corner uttered its weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense.

  “No, honey.” This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected. “No, honey, Ah ain’ goan hurt you, if Ah meant t’do dat, Ah’d just put two in yo’ haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs.”

  She saw something in his eyes — perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. “Dass ri’! Mistuh Collins, he daid! He ain’ nev’ goan come down he’ no mo an … whuh? Whu
t he do to you, Patrick?”

  Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest.

  “Whuh he do t’you, boy?”

  It was no good. He didn’t understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter.

  “He make you laugh?”

  Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose.

  “He make you cry, too.”

  Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going ho-ho-ho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and making smack-smack sounds with his lips.

  From above and slightly behind her, Roland said: “He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made you eat.”

  Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner.

  “He ate,” Detta said. “Dass whut you trine t’say, ain’t it? Dandelo ate.”

  Patrick nodded eagerly.

  “He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do!”

  Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if the head-banging started again. It didn’t. When she reached the boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept. Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes that he could come in now.

  When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration.

  “Don’t you worry,” Susannah said—Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. “He’s not going to get you, Patrick, he’s dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth.”

  Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she hated to see even more. It was shame.

  “Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth.”

  He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head of a mop.

  Roland said, “What—”

  “Hush,” she told him. “Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we’ll take you out of here and you’ll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo’s dinner again.”

  Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoner’s voice—or the words it articulated, anyway—and had pulled it out.

  SEVEN

  Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boy’s gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the hut’s only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins’s heavy parka hung on the hook in the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of Dandelo—Joe Collins that was—they had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow.

  She said, “Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there … Patrick was his cow. There’s two ways you can take nourishment from a cow: meat or milk. The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts, and then the stew, it’s gone. If you just take the milk, though, you can go on forever … always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then.”

  “How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?” Roland asked.

  “I don’t know.” But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. “A fairly long time, anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him.”

  “And it hurt.”

  “Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid’s tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is.”

  Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. “We can’t take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I’m sure it would kill him.”

  Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the house. That might kill her.

  Roland agreed when she said so. “We’ll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It’ll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back.”

  “You’d kill them both?”

  “Aye, if I could. Do’ee have a problem with that?”

  She considered it, then shook her head.

  “All right. Let’s put together what we’d take out there, for we’ll have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four.”

  EIGHT

  It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.

  During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more about Patrick Danville than she had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayre’s office.

  Dandelo had given his captive the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and had stolen emotions from him on a regular basis: two times a week, sometimes three, once in awhile even four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him, someone would happen by. Just lately, Patrick had been spared the worst of Dandelo’s depredations, because “company” had been more frequent than ever before. Roland told her later that night, after they’d bedded down in the hayloft, that he believed many of Dandelo’s most recent victims must have been exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi Russe or the town around it. Susannah could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such refugees: The King is gone, so let’s get the hell out of here while the getting’s good. After all, Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and he’s off his chump, round the bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor.

  On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then had eaten the boy’s resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors: like having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that.

  Patrick couldn’t talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find he’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencil-sharpener that looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.<
br />
  Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, “Let’s see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don’t you?”

  It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, with one hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.

  “What does it say?” Roland asked, fascinated.

  “‘YUM! Good!’” Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.

  Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made them—well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?—little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren’t sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam — would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.