Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  Wait a little longer, this voice counseled. Wait a little more. I might have another trick up my sleeve. Wait … wait just a little longer …

  Mordred waited. And after a moment or two, he felt the pulse from the Dark Tower change.

  EIGHT

  Patrick felt that change, too. The pulse became soothing. And there were words in it, ones that blunted his eagerness to draw. He made another line, paused, then put his pencil aside and only looked up at Old Mother, who seemed to pulse in time with the words he heard in his head, words Roland would have recognized. Only these were sung in an old man’s voice, quavering but sweet:

  “Baby-bunting, darling one,

  Now another day is done.

  May your dreams be sweet and merry,

  May you dream of fields and berries.

  Baby-bunting, baby-dear,

  Baby, bring your berries here.

  Oh chussit, chissit, chassit!

  Bring enough to fill your basket!”

  Patrick’s head nodded. His eyes closed … opened … slipped closed again.

  Enough to fill my basket, he thought, and slept in the firelight.

  NINE

  Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in the middle of Mordred’s hot and melting brains. Now. Go to him and make sure he never rises from his sleep. Murder him among the roses and we’ll rule together.

  Mordred came from hiding, the binoculars tumbling from a hand that was no longer a hand at all. As he changed, a feeling of huge confidence swept through him. In another minute it would be done. They both slept, and there was no way he could fail.

  He rushed down on the camp and the sleeping men, a black nightmare on seven legs, his mouth opening and closing.

  TEN

  Somewhere, a thousand miles away, Roland heard barking, loud and urgent, furious and savage. His exhausted mind tried to turn away from it, to blot it out and go deeper. Then there was a horrible scream of agony that awoke him in a flash. He knew that voice, even as distorted by pain as it was.

  “Oy!” he cried, leaping up. “Oy, where are you? To me! To m—”

  There he was, twisting in the spider’s grip. Both of them were clearly visible in the light of the fire. Beyond them, sitting propped against the cottonwood tree, Patrick gazed stupidly through a curtain of hair that would soon be dirty again, now that Susannah was gone. The bumbler wriggled furiously to and fro, snapping at the spider’s body with foam flying from his jaws even as Mordred bent him in a direction his back was never meant to go.

  If he’d not rushed out of the tall grass, Roland thought, that would be me in Mordred’s grip.

  Oy sent his teeth deep into one of the spider’s legs. In the firelight Roland could see the coin-sized dimples of the bumbler’s jaw-muscles as he chewed deeper still. The thing squalled and its grip loosened. At that moment Oy might have gotten free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping away in the momentary freedom granted him before Mordred was able to re-set his grip, Oy used the time to extend his long neck and seize the place where one of the thing’s legs joined its bloated body. He bit deep, bringing a flood of blackish-red liquor that ran freely from the sides of his muzzle. In the firelight it gleamed with orange sparks. Mordred squalled louder still. He had left Oy out of his calculations, and was now paying the price. In the firelight, the two writhing forms were figures out of a nightmare.

  Somewhere nearby, Patrick was hooting in terror.

  Worthless whoreson fell asleep after all, Roland thought bitterly. But who had set him to watch in the first place?

  “Put him down, Mordred!” he shouted. “Put him down and I’ll let you live another day! I swear it on my father’s name!”

  Red eyes, full of insanity and malevolence, peered at him over Oy’s contorted body. Above them, high on the curve of the spider’s back, were tiny blue eyes, hardly more than pinholes. They stared at the gunslinger with a hate that was all too human.

  My own eyes, Roland thought with dismay, and then there was a bitter crack. It was Oy’s spine, but in spite of this mortal injury he never loosened his grip on the joint where Mordred’s leg joined his body, although the steely bristles had torn away much of his muzzle, baring sharp teeth that had sometimes closed on Jake’s wrist with gentle affection, tugging him toward something Oy wanted the boy to see. Ake! he would cry on such occasions. Ake-Ake!

  Roland’s right hand dropped to his holster and found it empty. It was only then, hours after she had taken her leave, that he realized Susannah had taken one of his guns with her into the other world. Good, he thought. Good. If it is the darkness she found, there would have been five for the things in it and one for herself. Good.

  But this thought was also dim and distant. He pulled the other revolver as Mordred crouched on his hindquarters and used his remaining middle leg, curling it around Oy’s midsection and pulling the animal, still snarling, away from his torn and bleeding leg. The spider twirled the furry body upward in a terrible spiral. For a moment it blotted out the bright beacon that was Old Mother. Then he hurled Oy away from him and Roland had a moment of déjà vu, realizing he had seen this long ago, in the Wizard’s Glass. Oy arced across the fireshot dark and was impaled on one of the cottonwood branches the gunslinger himself had broken off for firewood. He gave an awful hurt cry—a death-cry—and then hung, suspended and limp, above Patrick’s head.

  Mordred came at Roland without a pause, but his charge was a slow, shambling thing; one of his legs had been shot away only minutes after his birth, and now another hung limp and broken, its pincers jerking spasmodically as they dragged on the grass. Roland’s eye had never been clearer, the chill that surrounded him at moments like this never deeper. He saw the white node and the blue bombardier’s eyes that were his eyes. He saw the face of his only son peering over the back of the abomination and then it was gone in a spray of blood as his first bullet tore it off. The spider reared up, legs clashing at the black and starshot sky. Roland’s next two bullets went into its revealed belly and exited through the back, pulling dark sprays of liquid with it. The spider slewed to one side, perhaps trying to run away, but its remaining legs would not support it. Mordred Deschain fell into the fire, casting up a flume of red and orange sparks. It writhed in the embers, the bristles on its belly beginning to burn, and Roland, grinning bitterly, shot it again. The dying spider rolled out of the now scattered fire on its back, its remaining legs twitching together in a knot and then spreading apart. One fell back into the fire and began to burn. The smell was atrocious.

  Roland started forward, meaning to stamp out the little fires the scattered embers had started in the grass, and then a howl of outraged fury rose in his head.

  My son! My only son! You’ve murdered him!

  “He was mine, too,” Roland said, looking at the smoldering monstrosity. He could own the truth. Yes, he could do that much.

  Come then! Come, son-killer, and look at your Tower, but know this—you’ll die of old age at the edge of the Can’-Ka before you ever so much as touch its door! I will never let you pass! Todash space itself will pass away before I let you pass! Murderer! Murderer of your mother, murderer of your friends—aye, every one, for Susannah lies dead with her throat cut on the other side of the door you sent her through—and now murderer of your own son!

  “Who sent him to me?” Roland asked the voice in his head. “Who sent yonder child—for that’s what he is, inside that black skin—to his death, ye red boggart?”

  To this there was no answer, so Roland reholstered his gun and put out the patches of fire before they could spread. He thought of what the voice had said about Susannah, decided he didn’t believe it. She might be dead, aye, might be, but he thought Mordred’s Red Father knew for sure no more than Roland himself did.

  The gunslinger let that thought go and went to the tree, where the last of his ka-tet hung, impaled … but still alive. The gold-ringed eyes looked at Roland with what might almost have been weary amusement.


  “Oy,” Roland said, stretching out his hand, knowing it might be bitten and not caring in the least. He supposed that part of him—and not a small one, either—wanted to be bitten. “Oy, we all say thank you. I say thank you, Oy.”

  The bumbler did not bite, and spoke but one word. “Olan,” said he. Then he sighed, licked the gunslinger’s hand a single time, hung his head down, and died.

  ELEVEN

  As dawn strengthened into the clear light of morning, Patrick came hesitantly to where the gunslinger sat in the dry streambed, amid the roses, with Oy’s body spread across his lap like a stole. The young man made a soft, interrogative hooting sound.

  “Not now, Patrick,” Roland said absently, stroking Oy’s fur. It was dense but smooth to the touch. He found it hard to believe that the creature beneath it had gone, in spite of the stiffening muscles and the tangled places where the blood had now clotted. He combed these smooth with his fingers as best he could. “Not now. We have all the livelong day to get there, and we’ll do fine.”

  No, there was no need to hurry; no reason why he should not leisurely mourn the last of his dead. There had been no doubt in the old King’s voice when he had promised that Roland should die of old age before he so much as touched the door in the Tower’s base. They would go, of course, and Roland would study the terrain, but he knew even now that his idea of coming to the Tower on the old monster’s blind side and then working his way around was not an idea at all, but a fool’s hope. There had been no doubt in the old villain’s voice; no doubt hiding behind it, either.

  And for the time being, none of that mattered. Here was another one he had killed, and if there was consolation to be had, it was this: Oy would be the last. Now he was alone again except for Patrick, and Roland had an idea Patrick was immune to the terrible germ the gunslinger carried, for he had never been ka-tet to begin with.

  I only kill my family, Roland thought, stroking the dead billy-bumbler.

  What hurt most was remembering how unpleasantly he had spoken to Oy the day before. If’ee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had thy chance!

  Had he stayed because he knew that Roland would need him? That when push came down to shove (it was Eddie’s phrase, of course), Patrick would fail?

  Why will’ee cast thy sad houken’s eyes on me now?

  Because he had known it was to be his last day, and his dying would be hard?

  “I think you knew both things,” Roland said, and closed his eyes so he could feel the fur beneath his hands better. “I’m so sorry I spoke to’ee so—would give the fingers on my good left hand if I could take the words back. So I would, every one, say true.”

  But here as in the Keystone World, time only ran one way. Done was done. There would be no taking back.

  Roland would have said there was no anger left, that every bit of it had been burned away, but when he felt the tingling all over his skin and understood what it meant, he felt fresh fury rise in his heart. And he felt the coldness settle into his tired but still talented hands.

  Patrick was drawing him! Sitting beneath the cottonwood just as if a brave little creature worth ten of him—no, a hundred!—hadn’t died in that very tree, and for both of them.

  It’s his way, Susannah spoke up calmly and gently from deep in his mind. It’s all he has, everything else has been taken from him—his home world as well as his mother and his tongue and whatever brains he might once have had. He’s mourning, too, Roland. He’s frightened, too. This is the only way he has of soothing himself.

  Undoubtedly all true. But the truth of it actually fed his rage instead of damping it down. He put his remaining gun aside (it lay gleaming between two of the singing roses) because having it close to hand wouldn’t do, no, not in his current mood. Then he rose to his feet, meaning to give Patrick the scolding of his life, if for no other reason than it would make Roland feel a little bit better himself. He could already hear the first words: Do you enjoy drawing those who saved your mostly worthless life, stupid boy? Does it cheer your heart?

  He was opening his mouth to begin when Patrick put his pencil down and seized his new toy, instead. The eraser was half-gone now, and there were no others; as well as Roland’s gun, Susannah had taken the little pink nubbins with her, probably for no other reason than that she’d been carrying the jar in her pocket and her mind had been studying other, more important, matters. Patrick poised the eraser over his drawing, then looked up—perhaps to make sure he really wanted to erase at all—and saw the gunslinger standing in the streambed and frowning at him. Patrick knew immediately that Roland was angry, although he probably had no idea under heaven as to why, and his face cramped with fear and unhappiness. Roland saw him now as Dandelo must have seen him time and time again, and his anger collapsed at the thought. He would not have Patrick fear him—for Susannah’s sake if not his own, he would not have Patrick fear him.

  And discovered that it was for his own sake, after all.

  Why not kill him, then? asked the sly, pulsing voice in his head. Kill him and put him out of his misery, if thee feels so tender toward him? He and the bumbler can enter the clearing together. They can make a place there for you, gunslinger.

  Roland shook his head and tried to smile. “Nay, Patrick, son of Sonia,” he said (for that was how Bill the robot had called the boy). “Nay, I was wrong—again—and will not scold thee. But …”

  He walked to where Patrick was sitting. Patrick cringed away from him with a doglike, placatory smile that made Roland angry all over again, but he quashed the emotion easily enough this time. Patrick had loved Oy too, and this was the only way he had of dealing with his sorrow.

  Little that mattered to Roland now.

  He reached down and gently plucked the eraser out of the boy’s fingers. Patrick looked at him questioningly, then reached out his empty hand, asking with his eyes that the wonderful (and useful) new toy be given back.

  “Nay,” Roland said, as gently as he could. “You made do for the gods only know how many years without ever knowing such things existed; you can make do the rest of this one day, I think. Mayhap there’ll be something for you to draw—and then undraw—later on. Do’ee ken, Patrick?”

  Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited in Roland’s pocket along with the watch, he seemed to forget about it and just went back to his drawing.

  “Put thy picture aside for a little, too,” Roland told him. Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then to the Tower Road, and made his interrogative hooting sound.

  “Aye,” Roland said, “but first we should see what Mordred had for gunna—there may be something useful there—and bury our friend. Will’ee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick?”

  Patrick was willing, and the burial didn’t take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By mid-morning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road which led to the Dark Tower.

  CHAPTER III: THE CRIMSON KING AND THE DARK TOWER

  ONE

  The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high … but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you must mark yon two travelers walking toward us with great care. The older man—he with the tanned, lined face and the gun on his hip—is pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The younger one—he with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes him look like a student in days of old—is walking along beside it. They are climbing a long, gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of others they have climbed. The overgrown road they follow is lined on either side with the remains of rock walls; wild roses grow in amiable profusion amid the tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brush-dotted land beyond these fallen walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Ri
ngs of the sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and plinths has the look of Stonehenge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids gathered in the center of that great circle, perhaps casting the runes, but the keepers of these monuments, these precursors of the Great Monument, are all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where once they worshipped.

  Never mind. It’s not old ruins we’ve come to observe near the end of our long journey, but the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait as he comes toward us. He comes. And comes. Relentless as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and the customs of the country; he is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much about him has changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to either side as he tops any hill—Always con yer vantage was Cort’s rule, and the last of his pupils has still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down … and stops. After a moment of staring at the broken, weed-infested paving of the road, he looks up again, more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in dread of what he thinks he has seen.