Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  I’m not ready, that part thought. And there was a deeper part—a part that remembered every nuance of what had become a recurring (and evolving) dream—that thought something else: I’m not meant to go at all. Not all the way.

  At last Roland said: “I thank you, Bill—we all say thank you, I’m sure—but I think we’ll pass on your kind offer. Were you to ask me why, I couldn’t say. Only that part of me thinks that tomorrowday’s too soon. That part of me thinks we should go the rest of the way on foot, just as we’ve already traveled so far.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “I’m not ready to be there yet. Not quite ready.”

  You too, Susannah marveled. You too.

  “I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.” He reached into his back pocket and brought out the photocopy of the Robert Browning poem that had been left for them in Dandelo’s medicine chest. “There’s something writ in here about remembering the old times before coming to the last battle … or the last stand. It’s well-said. And perhaps, really, all I need is what this poet speaks of—a draught of earlier, happier sights. I don’t know. But unless Susannah objects, I believe we’ll go on foot.”

  “Susannah doesn’t object,” she said quietly. “Susannah thinks it’s just what the doctor ordered. Susannah only objects to being dragged along behind like a busted tailpipe.”

  Roland gave her a grateful (if distracted) smile—he seemed to have gone away from her somehow during these last few days—and then turned back to Bill. “I wonder if you have a cart I could pull? For we’ll have to take at least some gunna …and there’s Patrick. He’ll have to ride part of the time.”

  Patrick looked indignant. He cocked an arm in front of him, made a fist, and flexed his muscle. The result—a tiny goose-egg rising on the biceps of his drawing-arm—seemed to shame him, for he dropped it quickly.

  Susannah smiled and reached out to pat his knee. “Don’t look like that, sugar. It’s not your fault that you spent God knows how long caged up like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house.”

  “I’m sure I have such a thing,” Bill said, “and a battery-powered version for Susannah. What I don’t have, I can make. It would take an hour or two at most.”

  Roland was calculating. “If we leave here with five hours of daylight ahead of us, we might be able to make twelve wheels by sunset. What Susannah would call nine or ten miles. Another five days at that rather leisurely speed would bring us to the Tower I’ve spent my life searching for. I’d come to it around sunset if possible, for that’s when I’ve always seen it in my dreams. Susannah?”

  And the voice inside—that deep voice—whispered: Four nights. Four nights to dream. That should be enough. Maybe more than enough. Of course, ka would have to intervene. If they had indeed outrun its influence, that wouldn’t—couldn’t—happen. But Susannah now thought ka reached everywhere, even to the Dark Tower. Was, perhaps, embodied by the Dark Tower.

  “That’s fine,” she told him in a faint voice.

  “Patrick?” Roland asked. “What do you say?”

  Patrick shrugged and flipped a hand in their direction, hardly looking up from his pad. Whatever they wanted, that gesture said. Susannah guessed that Patrick understood little about the Dark Tower, and cared less. And why would he care? He was free of the monster, and his belly was full. Those things were enough for him. He had lost his tongue, but he could sketch to his heart’s content. She was sure that to Patrick, that seemed like more than an even trade. And yet … and yet …

  He’s not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what is to become of us, then?

  She didn’t know, but she was queerly unworried about it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams.

  FOUR

  An hour later the three humes, the bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cut-down wagon that looked like a slightly larger version of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi. The wheels were tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full, Susannah thought, it would be like pulling a feather. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still … and she thought there wouldn’t be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open lands, the prairie-lands; all the snow-and tree-covered ridges were behind them. Bill had provided her with an electric runabout that was more scooter than golf-cart. Her days of being dragged along behind (“like a busted tailpipe”) were done.

  “If you’ll give me another half an hour, I can smooth this off,” Bill said, running a three-fingered steel hand along the edge where he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II.

  “We say thankya, but it won’t be necessary,” Roland said. “We’ll lay a couple of hides over it, just so.”

  He’s impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldn’t he be? I’m anxious to be off, myself.

  “Well, if you say so, let it be so,” Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. “I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again?”

  None of them answered that. They didn’t know.

  “There’s a mighty loud horn on the roof,” Bill said, pointing at the Federal. “I don’t know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal—radiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attack—but I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-sensors as still work pick him up, I’ll set it off. Perhaps you’ll hear.”

  “Thank you,” Roland said.

  “Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,” Bill pointed out. “You’d reach the Tower and never have to see him.”

  “That’s true enough,” Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad.

  “What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command Can’-Ka No Rey?”

  Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldn’t know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course.

  “Well, there’ll be water if God wills it,” said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, “or so the old people did say. And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”

  He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did—quite fervently, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for that, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was gentle.

  “Long days and pleasant nights, Bill,” she said. “May you do well, and we all say so.”

  “Thank you, madam,” he said and put her down. “I say thudda-thank, thumma-thank, thukka—” Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. “I say thank ya kindly.” He paused. “I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions.”

  FIVE

  Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it … and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

>   When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.

  When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.

  He didn’t draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.

  Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gentle touch. The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully. Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.

  The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.

  “What do you see?” she asked him.

  “What do you see?” he asked in turn.

  She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. “Well,” she said, “there’s Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there—oh my goodness!” She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. “That wasn’t there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn’t. That one’s in our world, Roland—we call it the Big Dipper!”

  He nodded. “And once, according to the oldest books in my father’s library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia’s Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again.” He turned to her, smiling. “Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!”

  SIX

  Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.

  SEVEN

  She’s in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not “Silent Night” or “What Child Is This” but the Rice Song: “Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-come-commala!” She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and

  (no twins here)

  she is comforted.

  She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.

  Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

  Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

  None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It’s a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob’s of solid gold, and filigreed with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber #2’s, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.

  Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It’s the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream. “Here,” he says, “I brought you hot chocolate.”

  She ignores the outstretched cup. She’s fascinated by the door. “It’s like the ones along the beach, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “Yes,” Eddie says.

  “No,” Jake says at the same time.

  “You’ll figure it out,” they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.

  She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland drew them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER . Writ upon this one is . And below that:

  THE ARTIST

  She turns back to them and they are gone.

  Central Park is gone.

  She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.

  On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: “Time’s almost up …hurry …”

  EIGHT

  She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him …and best I do it before I can s’much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon. But where do I go? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?

  This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though … Patrick was a … well, a pencil-slinger. Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn’t kill much with an Eberhard-Faber unless it was very sharp.

  She’d sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadn’t noticed. And she didn’t want him to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she’d decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whistling sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on the bottom of the plate, the attachment that looked so much like Patrick’s pencil sharpener. She thought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that?

  There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of the symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.

  Time’s almost up. Hurry.

  The next day her tears began.

  NINE

  There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open. Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then the great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breath and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.

  “Roland!” she said. “Yonder’s a herd of buffalo, or maybe they’re bison! Sure as death n taxes!”

  “Aye, do you say so?” Roland asked, with only passing interest. “We called em bannock, in the long ago. It’s a good-sized herd.”

  Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding the yellow barrel against his palm and shading with the tip. She could almost smell the dust boiling up from the herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Although it seemed to her that he’d taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own. That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their g
reat shaggy heads. Even their black eyes.

  “There hasn’t been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years,” she said.

  “Aye?” Still only polite interest. “But they’re in plenty here, I should say. If a little tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let’s take a couple. I’d like to taste some fresh meat that isn’t deer. Would you?”

  She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man she’d believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she?

  She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the ever-strengthening beat-beat-beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself.

  Beat-beat-beat.

  Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.

  That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight.

  “I think he’s out there someplace,” she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. “Watch well.”

  “I will,” he said. “And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast.”

  “You can count on it,” said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep.

  And dreamed.

  TEN

  The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing “Come Go With Me,” the old Del-Vikings hit), Jake (I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT’S A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesn’t offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies. That is the main difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps it’s both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward.