The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  “Yes—so far as I know, brains only come one to a customer.”

  For a moment she was too surprised at hearing Eddie’s phrase

  (one to a customer)

  coming from Roland’s mouth to realize he’d made a joke. Lame, yes, but a bona fide joke. Then she managed a token laugh. “Very funny, Roland. You know what I meant.”

  Roland nodded. “We’ll sleep one at a time and stand a watch, yes. I think that would be best.”

  Time and repetition had done its work; she’d now seen too many tumbling guts to feel squeamish about a few brains. They cracked heads, used Roland’s knife (its edge now dull) to pry open skulls, and removed the brains of their kill. These they put carefully aside, like a clutch of large gray eggs. By the time the last deer was debrained, Susannah’s fingers were so sore and swollen she could hardly bend them.

  “Lie over,” Roland said. “Sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

  She didn’t argue. Given her full belly and the heat of the fire, she knew sleep would come quickly. She also knew that when she woke up tomorrow, she was going to be so stiff that even sitting up would be difficult and painful. Now, though, she didn’t care. A feeling of vast contentment filled her. Some of it was having eaten hot food, but by no means all. The greater part of her well-being stemmed from a day of hard work, no more or less than that. The sense that they were not just floating along but doing for themselves.

  Jesus, she thought, I think I’m becoming a Republican in my old age.

  Something else occurred to her then: how quiet it was. No sounds but the sough of the wind, the whispering sleet (now starting to abate), and the crackle of the blessed fire.

  “Roland?”

  He looked at her from his place by the fire, eyebrows raised.

  “You’ve stopped coughing.”

  He smiled and nodded. She took his smile down into sleep, but it was Eddie she dreamed of.

  Nine

  They stayed three days in the camp by the stream, and during that time Susannah learned more about making hide garments than she would ever have believed (and much more than she really wanted to know).

  By casting a mile or so in either direction along the stream they found a couple of logs, one for each of them. While they looked, they used their makeshift pot to soak their hides in a dark soup of ash and water. They set their logs at an angle against the trunks of two willow trees (close, so they could work side by side) and used chert scrapers to dehair the hides. This took one day. When it was done, they bailed out the “pot,” turned the hide liner over and filled it up again, this time with a mixture of water and mashed brains. This “cold-weather hiding” was new to her. They put the hides in this slurry to soak overnight and, while Susannah began to make thread from strings of gristle and sinew, Roland re-sharpened his knife, then used it to whittle half a dozen bone needles. When he was done, all of his fingers were bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts. He coated them with wood-ash soak and slept with them that way, his hands looking as if they were covered with large and clumsy gray-black gloves. When he washed them off in a stream the following day, Susannah was amazed to see the cuts already well on their way to healing. She tried dabbing some of the wood-ash stuff on the persistent sore beside her mouth, but it stung horribly and she washed it away in a hurry.

  “I want you to whop this goddam thing off,” she said.

  Roland shook his head. “We’ll give it a little longer to heal on its own.”

  “Why?”

  “Cutting on a sore’s a bad idea unless you absolutely have to do it. Especially out here, in what Jake would have called ‘the boondogs.’ ”

  She agreed (without bothering to correct his pronunciation), but unpleasant images crept into her head when she lay down: visions of the pimple beginning to spread, erasing her face inch by inch, turning her entire head into a black, crusted, bleeding tumor. In the dark, such visions had a horrible persuasiveness, but luckily she was too tired for them to keep her awake long.

  On their second day in what Susannah was coming to think of as the Hide Camp, Roland built a large and rickety frame over a new fire, one that was low and slow. They smoked the hides two by two and then laid them aside. The smell of the finished product was surprisingly pleasant. It smells like leather, she thought, holding one to her face, and then had to laugh. That was, after all, exactly what it was.

  The third day they spent “making,” and here Susannah finally outdid the gunslinger. Roland sewed a wide and barely serviceable stitch. She thought that the vests and leggings he made would hold together for a month, two at the most, then begin to pull apart. She was far more adept. Sewing was a skill she’d learned from her mother and both grandmothers. At first she found Roland’s bone needles maddeningly clumsy, and she paused long enough to cover both the thumb and forefinger of her right hand with little deerskin caps which she tied in place. After that it went faster, and by mid-afternoon of making-day she was taking garments from Roland’s pile and oversewing his stitches with her own, which were finer and closer. She thought he might object to this—men were proud—but he didn’t, which was probably wise. It quite likely would have been Detta who replied to any whines and queasies.

  By the time their third night in Hide Camp had come, they each had a vest, a pair of leggings, and a coat. They also had a pair of mittens each. These were large and laughable, but would keep their hands warm. And, speaking of hands, Susannah was once more barely able to bend hers. She looked doubtfully at the remaining hides and asked Roland if they would spend another making-day here.

  He considered the idea, then shook his head. “We’ll load the ones that are left into the Ho Fat Tack-see, I think, along with some of the meat and chunks of ice from the stream to keep it cool and good.”

  “The Taxi won’t be any good when we come to the snow, will it?”

  “No,” he admitted, “but by then the rest of the hides will be clothing and the meat will be eaten.”

  “You just can’t stay here any longer, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? You hear it calling. The Tower.”

  Roland looked into the snapping fire and said nothing. Nor had to.

  “What’ll we do about hauling our gunna when we come to the white lands?”

  “Make a travois. And there’ll be plenty of game.”

  She nodded and started to lie down. He took her shoulders and turned her toward the fire, instead. His face came close to hers, and for a moment Susannah thought he meant to kiss her goodnight. He looked long and hard at the crusted sore beside her mouth, instead.

  “Well?” she finally asked. She could have said more, but he would have heard the tremor in her voice.

  “I think it’s a little smaller. Once we leave the Badlands behind, it may heal on its own.”

  “Do you really say so?”

  The gunslinger shook his head at once. “I say may. Now lie over, Susannah. Take your rest.”

  “All right, but don’t you let me sleep late this time. I want to watch my share.”

  “Yes. Now lie over.”

  She did as he said, and was asleep even before her eyes closed.

  Ten

  She’s in Central Park and it’s cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky, but she’s not cold. No, not in her new deerskin coat, leggings, vest, and funny deerskin mittens. There’s something on her head, too, pulled down over her ears and keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the cap off, curious, and sees it’s not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, but a red-and-green stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS.

  She looks at it, startled. Can you have déjà vu in a dream? Apparently so. She looks around and there are Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare and she realizes she has in her hands a combination of the caps they were wearing in some other dream. She feels a great, soaring burst of joy, as if she has just solved some supposedly insoluble problem: squaring the circle, let us say, or
finding the Ultimate Prime Number (take that, Blaine, may it bust ya brain, ya crazy choochoo train).

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

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

  Both have cups of hot chocolate, the perfect kind mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream.

  “What world is this?” she asks them, and realizes that somewhere nearby carolers are singing “What Child Is This.”

  “You must let him go his course alone,” says Eddie.

  “Yar, and you must beware of Dandelo,” says Jake.

  “I don’t understand,” Susannah says, and holds out her stocking cap to them. “Wasn’t this yours? Didn’t you share it?”

  “It could be your hat, if you want it,” says Eddie, and then holds out his cup. “Here, I brought you hot chocolate.”

  “No more twins,” says Jake. “There’s only one hat, do ya not see.”

  Before she can reply, a voice speaks out of the air and the dream begins to unravel. “NINETEEN,” says the voice. “This is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT.”

  With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by the smell of ash

  (wednesday)

  and leather. She sees Eddie’s lips moving and she thinks he’s saying a name, and then

  Eleven

  “Time to get up, Susannah,” Roland said. “It’s your watch.”

  She sat up, looking around. The campfire had burned low.

  “I heard him moving out there,” Roland said, “but that was some time ago. Susannah, are you all right? Were you dreaming?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There was only one hat in this dream, and I was wearing it.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  Nor did she understand herself. The dream was already fading, as dreams do. All she knew for sure was that the name on Eddie’s lips just before he faded away for good had been that of Patrick Danville.

  Chapter V:

  Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane

  One

  Three weeks after the dream of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more woods below. One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more sled than travois.

  Oy raced back and forth between Roland and Susannah, as if keeping a constant watch. His fur was thick and sleek from cold weather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the three of them were currently covering might have been a meadow in the warmer seasons, but now the ground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, because their way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worst was over. And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad—at least, not yet. There was plenty of game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire, and on the four occasions when the weather turned nasty and blizzards blew, they had simply laid up and waited for the storms to wear themselves out on the wooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did, although the angriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more took to the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on the ground. In the open places where the shrieking nor’east wind had been able to rage fully, there were drifts like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tall pines almost to their tops.

  After their first day in the White Lands, with Roland struggling to pull her (and then the snow had been less than a foot deep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months crossing those high, forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snowshoes, so that first night she’d set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error process (“By guess and by gosh” was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger pronounced her third effort a success. The frames were made of limber birch branches, the centers of woven, overlapping deerskin strips. To Roland they looked like teardrops.

  “How did you know to do this?” he asked her after his first day of wearing them. The increase in distance covered was nothing short of amazing, especially once he had learned to walk with a kind of rolling, shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the latticed surfaces.

  “Television,” Susannah said. “There used to be this program I watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Sergeant Preston didn’t have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he did have his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the guy’s snowshoes looked like.” She pointed to the ones Roland was wearing. “That’s the best I could do.”

  “You did fine,” he said, and the sincerity she heard in his simple compliment made her tingle all over. This was not necessarily the way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for that matter) to make her feel, but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature or nurture, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  “They’ll be all right as long as they don’t fall apart,” she allowed. Her first effort had done just that.

  “I don’t feel the strips loosening,” he told her. “Stretching a little, maybe, but that’s all.”

  Now, as they crossed the great open space, that third pair of snowshoes was still holding together, and because she felt as though she’d made some sort of contribution, Susannah was able to let Roland pull her along without too much guilt. She did wonder about Mordred from time to time, and one night about ten days after they had crossed the snow-boundary, she came out and asked Roland to tell her what he knew. What prompted her was his declaration that there was no need to set a watch, at least for awhile; they could both get a full ten hours’ worth of sleep, if that’s what their bodies could use. Oy would wake them if they needed waking.

  Roland had sighed and looked into the fire for nearly a full minute, his arms around his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them. She had just about decided he wasn’t going to answer at all when he said, “Still following, but falling further and further behind. Struggling to eat, struggling to catch up, struggling most of all to stay warm.”

  “To stay warm?” To Susannah this seemed hard to believe. There were trees all around them.

  “He has no matches and none of the Sterno stuff, either. I believe that one night—early on, this would have been—he came upon one of our fires with live coals still under the ash, and he was able to carry some with him for a few days after that and so have a fire at night. It’s how the ancient rock-dwellers used to carry fire on their journeys, or so I was told.”

  Susannah nodded. She had been taught roughly the same thing in a high school science class, although the teacher had admitted a lot of what they knew about how Stone Age people got along wasn’t true knowledge at all, but only informed guesswork. She wondered how much of what Roland had just told her was also guesswork, and so she asked him.

  “It’s not guessing, but I can’t explain it. If it’s the touch, Susannah, it’s not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although…do you believe we have dreams sometimes we don’t remember after we awaken?”

  “Yes.” She thought of telling him about rapid eye movement, and the REM sleep experiments she’d read about in Look magazine, then decided it would be too complex. She contented herself with saying that she was sure folks had dreams every single night that they didn’t remember.

  “Mayhap I see him and hear him in those,” Roland said. “All I know is that he’s struggling to keep up. He knows so little about the world that it’s really a wonder he’s still alive at all.”

  “Do you feel sorry for him?”

  “No. I can’t afford pity, and neither can you.”

  But his eyes had left hers when he said that, and she thought he was lying. Maybe he didn’t want to feel sorry for Mordred, but she was sure he did, at least a little. Maybe he wanted to hope that Mordred would die on their trail—certainly there were plenty of chances it would happen, with hypothermia being the most likely
cause—but Susannah didn’t think he was quite able to do it. They might have outrun ka, but she reckoned that blood was still thicker than water.

  There was something else, however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She knew, because she could now feel it beating in her own head, both sleeping and waking. It was the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now. She had no idea what they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got there, but she found she no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was to see it. The idea of entering it was still more than her imagination could deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that. And she thought that seeing it would be enough.

  Two

  They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland’s heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again. Bright blue holes sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at work, constantly pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from horizon to horizon, and had a low full look both of them now recognized. More snow was on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst they’d seen. The wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to numb all his exposed skin (after three weeks of diligent needlework, that amounted to not much more than his forehead and the tip of his nose). The gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past them and then on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully.

  Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except once, in the outland of Mejis), grunted. He knew what would be beautiful to him: decent cover when the storm overtook them, something more than just a thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when the latest gust of wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band, stepped out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her. Dressed in hides from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a man.