The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  She reached into the bag for another can of Sterno, but at first the release-ring defied her. The thing was coming and now she could see any number of short, misshapen legs beneath its raised lump of a head. Not a worm after all but some kind of giant centipede. Oy placed himself in front of her, still barking, every tooth on display. It was Oy the thing would take first if she couldn’t—

  Then her finger slipped into the ring lying almost flat against the lid of the can. There was a pop-hissh sound. Roland was waving the flashlight back and forth, trying to fan a little life into the guttering flames (which might have worked had there been fuel for them), and she saw their fading shadows rock deliriously back and forth on the decaying tile walls.

  The circumference of the bone was too big for the can. Now lying in an awkward sprawl, half in and half out of the harness, she dipped into it, brought out a handful of jelly, and slathered it up and down the bone. If the bone was wet, this would only buy them a few more seconds of horror. If it was dry, however, then maybe…just maybe…

  The thing was creeping ever closer. Amid the tentacles sprouting from its mouth she could see jutting fangs. In another moment it would be close enough to lunge at Oy, taking him with the speed of a gecko snatching a fly out of the air. Its rotted-fish aroma was strong and nauseating. And what might be behind it? What other abominations?

  No time to think about that now.

  She touched her thighbone torch to the fading flames licking along the barrel of the flashlight. The bloom of fire was greater than she had expected—far greater—and the thing’s scream this time was filled with pain as well as surprise. There was a nasty squelching sound, like mud being squeezed in a vinyl raincoat, and it lashed backward.

  “Git me more bones,” she said as Roland cast the flashlight aside. “And make sure they’re dem drah bones.” She laughed at her own wit (since nobody else would), a down-and-dirty Detta cackle.

  Still gasping for breath, Roland did as she told him.

  Thirteen

  They resumed their progress along the passage, Susannah now riding backward, a position that was difficult but not impossible. If they got out of here, her back would ache a bitch for the next day or two. And I’ll relish every single throb, she told herself. Roland still had the Bridgton Old Home Days tee-shirt Irene Tassenbaum had bought him. He handed it up to Susannah. She wrapped it around the bottom of the bone and held it out as far as she possibly could while still keeping her balance. Roland wasn’t able to run—she would have surely tumbled out of the harness had he tried doing that—but he maintained a good fast walking pace, pausing every now and then to pick up a likely-looking arm- or legbone. Oy soon got the idea and began bringing them to the gunslinger in his mouth. The thing continued to follow them. Every now and then Susannah caught a glimpse of its slick-gleaming skin, and even when it drew back beyond the chancy light of her current torch they would hear those liquid stomping sounds, like a giant in mud-filled boots. She began to think it was the sound of the thing’s tail. This filled her with a horror that was unreasoning and private and almost powerful enough to undo her mind.

  That it should have a tail! her mind nearly raved. A tail that sounds like it’s filled with water or jelly or half-coagulated blood! Christ! My God! My Christ!

  It wasn’t just light keeping it from attacking them, she reckoned, but fear of fire. The thing must have hung back while they were in the part of the passage where the glow-globes still worked, thinking (if it could think) that it would wait and take them once they were in the dark. She had an idea that if it had known they had access to fire, it might simply have closed some or all of its many eyes and pounced on them where a few of the globes were out and the light was dimmer. Now it was at least temporarily out of luck, because the bones made surprisingly good torches (the idea that they were being helped by the recovering Beam in this regard did not cross her mind). The only question was whether or not the Sterno would hold out. She was able to conserve now because the bones burned on their own once they were going—except for a couple of damp ones that she had to cast aside after lighting her next torches from their guttering tips—but you did have to get them going, and she was already deep into the third and last can. She bitterly regretted the one she’d tossed away when the thing had been closing in on them, but didn’t know what else she could have done. She also wished Roland would go faster, although she guessed he now couldn’t have maintained much speed even if she’d been faced around the right way and holding onto him. Maybe a short burst, but surely no more. She could feel his muscles trembling under his shirt. He was close to blown out.

  Five minutes later, while getting a handful of canned heat to slather on a bony bulb of knee atop a shinbone, her fingers touched the bottom of the Sterno can. From the darkness behind them came another of those watery stomping sounds. The tail of their friend, her mind insisted. It was keeping pace. Waiting for them to run out of fuel and for the world to go dark again. Then it would pounce.

  Then it would eat.

  Fourteen

  They were going to need a fallback position. She became sure of that almost as soon as the tips of her fingers touched the bottom of the can. Ten minutes and three torches later, Susannah prepared to tell the gunslinger to stop when—and if—they came to another especially large ossuary. They could make a bonfire of rags and bones, and once it was going hot and bright, they’d simply run like hell. When—and if—they heard the thing on their side of the fire-barrier again, Roland could lighten his load and speed his heels by leaving her behind. She saw this idea not as self-sacrificing but merely logical—there was no reason for the monstrous centipede to get both of them if they could avoid it. And she had no plans to let it take her, as far as that went. Certainly not alive. She had his gun, and she’d use it. Five shots for Sai Centipede; if it kept coming after that, the sixth for herself.

  Before she could say any of these things, however, Roland got in three words that stopped all of hers. “Light,” he panted. “Up ahead.”

  She craned around and at first saw nothing, probably because of the torch she’d been holding out. Then she did: a faint white glow.

  “More of those globes?” she asked. “A stretch of them that are still working?”

  “Maybe. I don’t think so.”

  Five minutes later she realized she could see the floor and walls in the light of her latest torch. The floor was covered with a fine scrim of dust and pebbles such as could only have been blown in from outside. Susannah threw her arms up over her head, one hand holding a blazing bone wrapped in a shirt, and gave a scream of triumph. The thing behind her answered with a roar of fury and frustration that did her heart good even as it pebbled her skin with goosebumps.

  “Goodbye, honey!” she screamed. “Goodbye, you eye-covered muthafuck!”

  It roared again and thrust itself forward. For one moment she saw it plain: a huge round lump that couldn’t be called a face in spite of the lolling mouth; the segmented body, scratched and oozing from contact with the rough walls; a quartet of stubby armlike appendages, two on each side. These ended in snapping pincers. She shrieked and thrust the torch back at it, and the thing retreated with another deafening roar.

  “Did your mother never teach you that it’s wrong to tease the animals?” Roland asked her, and his tone was so dry she couldn’t tell if he was kidding her or not.

  Five minutes after that they were out.

  Chapter II:

  On Badlands Avenue

  One

  They exited through a crumbling hillside arch beside a Quonset hut similar in shape but much smaller than the Arc 16 Experimental Station. The roof of this little building was covered with rust. There were piles of bones scattered around the front in a rough ring. The surrounding rocks had been blackened and splintered in places; one boulder the size of the Queen Anne house where the Breakers had been kept was split in two, revealing an interior filled with sparkling minerals. The air was cold and they could hear the restless wh
ine of the wind, but the rocks blocked the worst of it and they turned their faces up to the sharp blue sky with wordless gratitude.

  “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.

  FOR-EVER.

  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.