The Dark Tower VII

by Stephen King

  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.

  Roland looke
d 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.

  Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.

  Nine

  Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.

  “I think it’s likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?”

  She remembered very well, and said so.

  “It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”

  “But you don’t think so.” She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.

  “No,” Roland said. “He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”

  This raised a question in her mind. “We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she said. “How old do you think he is?”

  Roland shook his head. “Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest to that.”

  “Did Stephen King put him in our way?”

  “I can’t say, only that he knew of him, sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?”

  She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala! commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’s alone. But she had begun to hope that that didn’t necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her quest.

  She had been having her own dreams.

  Ten

  Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combination truck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow’s operator) would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab’s roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. “ ‘California Sun ’! The Rivieras! Oh, doesn’t it sound fine!”

  “If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keep hold of thy plate.”

  “You can count on that,” she said.

  Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL. This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his head reading YARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn’t think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life.

  Eleven

  The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo’s hut, and although the engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the driver’s seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shiny-headed robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucas’s C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the snowfields:

  “HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW? HOW ARE TRICKS IN KUH-KUH-KOKOMO?”

  Roland stepped out of the late Lippy’s quarters. “Hile, Bill,” he said mildly. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

  The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn’t appear to be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head—twirling and twirling in the bright morning light—and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasy-Japaneezy, Eddie would have said.

  “Ah!” said the robot. “A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g—” He raised an arm that had
not oneelbow-joint

  but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a little whistling noise—Wheeep!—and then he finished: “A gunslinger!”

  Susannah laughed. She couldn’t help it. They had come all this way to meet an oversized electronic version of Porky Pig. T’beya-t’beya-t’beya, that’s all, folks!

  “I had heard rumors of such on the l-l-l-land,” the robot said, ignoring her laughter. “Are you Ruh-Ruh-Roland of G-Gilead?”

  “So I am,” Roland said. “And you?”

  “William, D-746541-M, Maintenance Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me Stuh-huttering B-Bill. I’ve got a f-f-fried sir-hirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuh-fuh-forbade me. And since he’s the only h-human around…or was…” He stopped. Susannah could quite clearly hear the clitter-clack of relays somewhere inside and what she thought of wasn’t C3P0, who she’d of course never seen, but Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.

  Then Stuttering Bill quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and bowing…but not to either her or to Roland. He said, “Hile, Patrick D-Danville, son of S-S-Sonia! It’s good to see you out and in the c-c-clear, so it is!” And Susannah could hear the emotion in Stuttering Bill’s voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay about lowering her plate.

  Twelve

  They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been quite willing to go into the hut, for he had but rudimentary olfactory equipment. The humes were better equipped and knew that the hut stank and had not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were both out. In any case, the palaver didn’t take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe Collins as his master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the job. Besides, Collins/Dandelo had the necessary code-words.