The Dark Tower (Page 32)
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 die 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 Rings 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 die 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. Relendess as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and die 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 conyer vantagewas 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.
And it's here we mustjoin him-sink into him-although how we will ever con the vantage of Roland's heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some moments are beyond imagination.
Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the hill, not because he expected trouble but because the habit was too deeply ingrained to break. Always con yer vantage, Cort had told them, drilling it into their heads from the time when they had been litde more than babbies. He looked back down at the road-it was becoming more and more difficult to swerve among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so far-and then, belatedly, realized what he had just seen.
What you thought you saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road. It's probably just another of the strange ruins we've been passing ever since we started moving again.
But even then Roland knew it wasn't so. What he'd seen was not to either side of the Tower Road, but dead ahead.
He looked up again, hearing his neck creak like hinges in an old door, and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses, was the top of the Dark Tower. That which he had seen in a thousand dreams he now saw with his living eyes.
Sixty or eighty yards ahead, the road rose to a higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the ivy and honeysuckle on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center of this near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny portion of the blue sky.
Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of his hooting sounds.
"Do you see it?" Roland asked. His voice was dusty, cracked with amazement. Then, before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger pointed to what the boy wore around his neck. In the end, the binoculars had been the only item in Mordred's little bit of gunna worth taking.
"Give them over, Pat."
Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes, made a minute adjustment to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath as the top of the Tower sprang into view, seemingly close enough to touch. How much was visible over the horizon? How much was he looking at? Twenty feet? Perhaps as much as fifty? He didn't know, but he could see at least three of the narrow slit-windows which ascended the Tower's barrel in a spiral, and he could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him like the very Eye of Todash.
Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland handed the glasses over without a murmur. He felt light-headed, not really there. It occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam.
He had sensed something coming, some vast change, and that was what he felt now.
Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder is my destiny, the end of my life's road. And yet my heart still beats (a little faster than before, 'tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt when I bend over to grasp the handies of this becurst cart my back will groan and I may pass a little gas.
Nothing at all has changed.
He waited for the disappointment this thought surely presaged-the letdown. It didn't come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed to begin in his mind and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since setting out at mid-morning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind.
He felt free.
Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was excited. He pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted.
"Yes," Roland said. "Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint it, along with Llamrei, Arthur Eld's horse. That I know, for I've seen the proof. As for now, it's where we must go."
Patrick hooted again, then pulled a long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed his head back and forth, like someone who has a terrible headache.
"Yes," Roland said. "I'm afraid, too. But there's no help for it. I have to go there. Would you stay here, Patrick? Stay and wait for me? If you would, I give you leave to do so."
Patrick shook his head at once. And, just in case Roland didn't take the point, the mute boy seized his arm in a hard grip. The right hand, the one with which he drew, was like iron.
Roland nodded. Even tried to smile. 'Yes," he said, "that's fine. Stay with me as long as you like. As long as you understand that in the end I'll have to go on alone."
THREE
Now, as they rose from each dip and topped each hill, the Dark Tower seemed to spring closer. More of the spiraling windows which ran around its great circumference became visible.
Roland could see two steel posts jutting from the top. The clouds which followed the Paths of the two working Beams seemed to flow away from the tips, making a great X-shape in the sky. The voices grew louder, and Roland realized they were singing the names of the world. Of all the worlds. He didn't know how he could know that, but he was sure of it. That lightness of being continued to fill him up. Finally, as they crested a hill with great stone men marching away to the north on their left (the remains of their faces, painted in some blood-red stuff, glared down upon them), Roland told Patrick to climb up into the cart. Patrick looked surprised. He made a series of hooting noises Roland took to mean But aren'tyou tired1?
"Yes, but I need an anchor, even so. Without one I'm apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows better. And if plain old exhaustion doesn't burst my heart, the Red King's apt to take my head off with one of his toys. Get in, Patrick."
Patrick did so. He rode sitting hunched forward, with the binoculars pressed against his eyes.
FOUR
Three hours later, they came to the foot of a much steeper hill.
It was, Roland's heart told him, the last hill. Can'-Ka No Rey was beyond. At the top, on the right, was a cairn of boulders that had once been a small pyramid. What remained stood about thirty feet high. Roses grew around its base in a rough crimson ring. Roland set this in his sights and took the hill slowly, pulling the cart by its handles. As he climbed, the top of the Dark Tower once more appeared. Each step brought a greater length of it into view. Now he could see the balconies with their waisthigh railings. There was no need of the binoculars; the air was preternaturally clear. He put the distance remaining at no more than five miles. Perhaps only three. Level after level rose before his not-quite-disbelieving eye.
Just shy of this hill's top, with the crumbling rock pyramid twenty paces ahead of them on the right, Roland stopped, bent, and set the handles of the cart on the road for the last time. Every nerve in his body spoke of danger.
"Patrick? Hop down."
Patrick did so, looking anxiously into Roland's face and hooting.
The gunslinger shook his head. "I can't say why just yet.
Only it's not safe." The voices sang in a great chorus, but the air around them was still. Not a bird soared overhead or sang in the distance. The wandering herds of bannock had all been left behind. A breeze soughed around them, and the grasses rippled.
The roses nodded their wild heads.
The two of them walked on together, and as they did, Roland felt a timid touch against the side of his two-fingered right hand.
He looked at Patrick. The mute boy looked anxiously back, trying to smile. Roland took his hand, and they crested the hill in that fashion.
Below them was a great blanket of red that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The road cut through it, a dusty white line perfectly straight and perhaps twelve feet wide. In the middle of the rose-field stood the sooty dark gray Tower, just as it had stood in his dreams; its windows gleamed in the sun. Here the road split and made a perfect white circle around the Tower's base to continue on the other side, in a direction Roland believed was now dead east instead of south-by-east.
Another road ran off at right angles to the Tower Road: to the north and south, if he was right in believing that the points of the compass had been re-established. From above, the Dark Tower would look like the center of a blood-filled gunsight.
"It's-" Roland began, and then a great, crazed shriek floated to them on the breeze, weirdly undiminished by the distance of miles. It comes on the Beam, Roland thought. And it's carried by the roses.
"GUNSLINGER!"screamed the Crimson King. "NOW YOU DIE!"
There was a whisding sound, thin at first and then growing, cutting through the combined song of the Tower and die roses like the keenest blade ever ground on a wheel dusted with diamonds.
Patrick stood transfixed, peering dumbly at the Tower; he would have been blown out of his boots if not for Roland, whose reflexes were as quick as ever. He pulled the mute boy behind die heaped stone of the pyramid by their joined hands.
There were other stones hidden in the high grass of dock and jimson; they stumbled over these and went sprawling. Roland felt the corner of one digging painfully into his ribs.
The whistle continued to rise, becoming an earsplitting whine. Roland saw a golden something flash past in the air-one of the sneetches. It struck the cart and it blew up, scattering their gunna every which way. Most of the stuff settled back to the road, cans rattling and bouncing, some of them burst.
Then came high, chattering laughter that set Roland's teeth on edge; beside him, Patrick covered his ears. The lunacy in that laughter was almost unbearable.
"COME OUT!" urged that distant, mad, laughing voice.
"COME OUT AND PLAY, ROLAND! COME TO ME! COME TO YOUR TO\WR, AFTER ALL THE LONG YEARS WILL YOU NOT?"
Patrick looked at him, his eyes desperate and frightened.
He was holding his drawing pad against his chest like a shield.
Roland peered carefully around the edge of the pyramid, and there, on a balcony two levels up from the Tower's base, he saw exactly what he had seen in sai Sayre's painting: one blob of red and three blobs of white; a face and two upraised hands.
But this was no painting, and one of the hands moved rapidly forward in a throwing gesture and there came another hellish, rising whine. Roland rolled back against the tumble of the pyramid. There was a pause that seemed endless, and then the sneetch struck the pyramid's other side and exploded.
The concussion threw them forward onto their faces. Patrick screamed in terror. Rocks flew to either side in a spray. Some of them rattled down on the road, but Roland saw not a single piece of shrapnel strike so much as a single rose.
The boy scrambled to his knees and would have run-likely back into the road-but Roland grabbed him by the collar of his hide coat and yanked him down again.
"We're safe enough here," he murmured to Patrick.
"Look." He reached into a hole revealed by the falling rock, knocked on the interior with his knuckles, produced a dull ringing noise, and showed his teeth in a strained grin. "Steel!
Yar! He can hit this thing with a dozen of his flying fireballs and not knock it down. All he can do is blast away the rocks and blocks and expose what lies beneadi. Kennit? And I don't think he'll waste his ammunition. He can't have much more than a donkey's carry."
Before Patrick could reply, Roland peered around the pyramid's ragged edge once more. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed: "TRYAGAIN, SAI! WE'RE STILL HERE, BUT PERHAPS YOUR NEXT THROW WILL BE LUCKY!"
There was a moment of silence, then an insane scream:
"FFFFFFFFFFF! YOU DON'T DARE MOCK ME! YOU DON'T DARE! FFFFFFFFFFF."
Now came another of tiiose rising whisdes. Roland grabbed Patrick and fell on top of him, behind the pyramid but not against it. He was afraid it might vibrate hard enough when the sneetch struck to give them concussion injuries, or turn their soft insides to jelly.
Only this time the sneetch didn't strike the pyramid. It flew past it instead, soaring above the road. Roland rolled off Patrick and onto his back. His eyes picked up the golden blur and marked the place where it buttonhooked back toward its targets. He shot it out of the air like a clay plate. There was a blinding flash and then it was gone.
"OH DEAR, STILL HERE!"Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasn't easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.
Another crazed scream in response-"EEEEEEEEE!"Roland was amazed that the Red King didn't split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he'd emptied-he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could-and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whisde, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he'd been famous in his time, this was it.
Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the world's clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.
He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King's back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.
"HOW SLOW YOU ARE!" the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. "TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!"
Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure's feet, but wasn't entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony's floor and its railing obscured it.
Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn't matter.
Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time,
Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he'd been made for.
Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.
The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony's railing... and then peer directly into the gunslinger's eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.
The King's call drifted to him. "WAIT THEN, A BIT-AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOUD GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND... LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!"
He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind... and what the King wanted him to hear.
The call of the Tower.
Come, Roland, sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can'-Ka No Rey, they came from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach... that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices weren't constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, die level of the call grew stronger. He began to understand-and with growing horror-why in his dreams and visions he had always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon.
He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Tower's strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able to stop him.
Come... come... became COME... COME... and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid.
Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that call-Roland understood this-but he knew what was happening.
FIVE
They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed.
"TRYAGAIN!"he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were carrying-the air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatic's flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger.
"COME, GUNSLJNGER!" the madman's voice coaxed. "PERHAPS I'll LET THEE COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT?"
To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice.
Yes, he thought grimly. And we'll have coffee. Perhaps even a little fry-up.
He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower
(come, Roland come, gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey's done)
was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end of the rose-field.
And the torture continued.
SIX
He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that someuiing would occur to him, some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocket-watch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag, he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown out of his boots.
He would die among the roses.
"Patrick," he said. His voice was husky.
Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boy's hands-dirty, scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his own-and gave in. It occurred to him that he'd only held out as long as this from pride; he had wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the King what he'd done to the sore on Susannah's face. But the pull of the Tower would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone.
"Change places with me, Patrick."
Patrick did, scrambling carefully over Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road.
"Look through the far-seeing instrument. Lay it in that notch-yes, just so-and look."
Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked back at him.
"Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man." Not that he luas a man, but at least he looked like one.
At first, however, Patrick only continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides of the gunslinger's head in his hands and brought it forward until they were brow to brow.
Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Roland's mind. It was not the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. He's not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts.
Where had Roland heard those words before?
No time to think about it now.
"Are you saying you can't?" Roland asked, injecting (with an effort) a note of disappointed incredulity into his voice. "That you can't? That Patrick can't? The Artist can't?"
Patrick's eyes changed. For a moment Roland saw in them the expression that would be there permanently if he grew to be a man... and the paintings in Sayre's office said that he would do that, at least on some track of time, in some world. Old enough, at least, to paint what he had seen this day. That expression would be hauteur, if he grew to be an old man with a little wisdom to match his talent; now it was only arrogance.
The look of a kid who knows he's faster than blue blazes, the best, and cares to know nothing else. Roland knew that look, for had he not seen it gazing back at him from a hundred mirrors and still pools of water when he had been as young as Patrick Danville was now?
I can, came the voice in Roland's head. I only say it won't be easy. I'll need the eraser.
Roland shook his head at once. In his pocket, his hand closed around what remained of the pink nubbin and held it tight.
"No," he said. "Thee must draw cold, Patrick. Every line right the first time. The erasing comes later."
For a moment the look of arrogance faltered, but only for a moment. When it returned, what came with it pleased the gunslinger mightily, and eased him a litde, as well. It was a look of hot excitement. It was die look the talented wear when, after years of just moving sleepily along from pillar to post, they are finally challenged to do something that will tax their abilities, stretch them to their limits. Perhaps even beyond them.
Patrick rolled to the binoculars again, which he'd left propped aslant just below the notch. He looked long while the voices sang their growing imperative in Roland's head.
And at last he rolled away, took up his pad, and began to draw the most important picture of his life.
SEVEN
It was slow work compared to Patrick's usual method-rapid strokes diat produced a completed and compelling drawing in only minutes. Roland again and again had to restrain himself from shouting at the boy: Hurry up! For the sake of all the gods, hurry up! Can't you see that I'm in agony here?
But Patrick didn't see and wouldn't have cared in any case.
I don't care what it is. Just let him finish before I go mad and sprint to what the Old Red King so rightly called "my darling."
Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion.
Once the Crimson King called more coaxingly than ever to Roland, asking if he would not come to the Tower and palaver, after all. Perhaps, he said, if Roland were to free him from his balcony prison, they might bury an arrow together and then climb to the top room of the Tower in that same spirit of friendliness. It was not impossible, after all. A hard rain made for queer bedfellows at the inn; had Roland never heard that saying?
The gunslinger knew the saying well. He also knew that the Red King's offer was essentially the same false request as before, only this time dressed up in morning coat and cravat. And this time Roland heard worry lurking in the old monster's voice. He wasted no energy on reply.
Realizing his coaxing had failed, the Crimson King threw another sneetch. This one flew so high over the pyramid it was only a spark, then dove down upon them with the scream of a falling bomb. Roland took care of it with a single shot and reloaded from a plentitude of shells. He wished, in fact, that the King would send more of the flying grenados against him, because they took his mind temporarily off the dreadful call of the Tower.
It's been waiting for me, he thought with dismay. That's what makes it so hard to resist, I think-it's calling me in particular. Not to Roland, exactly, but to the entire line of Eld... and of that line, only I am left.
EIGHT
At last, as the descending sun began to take on its first hues of orange and Roland felt he could stand it no longer, Patrick put his pencil aside and held the pad out to Roland, frowning. The look made Roland afraid. He had never seen that particular expression in the mute boy's repertoire. Patrick's former arrogance was gone.
Roland took the pad, however, and for a moment was so amazed by what he saw there that he looked away, as if even the eyes in Patrick's drawing might have the power to fascinate him; might perhaps compel him to put his gun to his temple and blow out his aching brains. It was that good. The greedy and questioning face was long, the cheeks and forehead marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the foaming beard were full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would.
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU're DOING?" came that screaming, lunatic voice. "IT WON'T DO YOU ANY GOOD, WHATEVER IT IS! I HOLD THE TOWER-EEEEEEEE!-I'M LIKE THE DOG WITH THE GRAPES, ROLAND! IT's MINE EVEN IF I CANT CLIMB IT! AND YOU'll COME! EEEEE! SAY TRUE! BEFORE THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER REACHES YOUR PALTRY HIDING-PLACE, YOU'll COME! FFFFFFFFJ FFFFFFFFJ EEEEEEEE!"
Patrick covered his ears, wincing. Now that he had finished drawing, he registered those terrible screams again.
That the picture was the greatest work of Patrick's life Roland had absolutely no doubt. Challenged, the boy had done more than rise above himself; he had soared above himself and committed genius. The image of the Crimson King was haunting in its clarity. The far-seeing instrument can't explain this, or not all of it, Roland thought. It's as if he has a third eye, one that looks out from his imagination and sees everything. It's that eye he looks through when he rolls the other two up. To own such an ability as this... and to express it with something as humble as a pencil! Ye gods!
He almost expected to see the pulse begin to beat in the hollows of the old man's temples, where clocksprings of veins had been delineated with only a few gende, feathered shadings. At the corner of the full and sensuous lips, the gunslinger could see the wink of a single sharp
(t U S k)
tooth, and he thought the lips of the drawing might come to life and part as he looked, revealing a mouthful of fangs: one mere wink of white (which was only a bit of unmarked paper, after all) made the imagination see all the rest, and even to smell the reek of meat that would accompany each outflow of breath.
Patrick had perfectly captured a tuft of hair curling from one of the King's nostrils, and a tiny thread of scar that wove in and out of the King's right eyebrow like a bit of string. It was a marvelous piece of work, better by far than the portrait the mute boy had done of Susannah. Surely if Patrick had been able to erase the sore from that one, then he could erase the Crimson King from this one, leaving nothing but the balcony railing before him and the closed door to the Tower's barrel behind. Roland almost expected the Crimson King to breathe and move, and so surely it was done! Surely...
But it was not. It was not, and wanting would not make it so.
Not even needing would make it so.
It's his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form. They were dreadfully good, but they weren't right. Roland felt a kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard enough to make his teeth chatter. They 're not quite r-
Patrick took hold of Roland's elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes.
Yes. His eyes. I know that! But what's wrong with them?
Patrick was still touching the corners of his eyes. Overhead, a flock of rusties flew through a sky that would soon be more purple than blue, squalling the harsh cries that had given them their name. It was toward the Dark Tower that they flew; Roland arose to follow them so they should not have what he could not.
Patrick grabbed him by his hide coat and pulled him back.
The boy shook his head violently, and this time pointed toward the road.
"I SAW THAT, ROLAND!" came the cry. "YOU THINK THAT WHAT's GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BIRDS IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, DO YOU NOT? EEEEEEEEE! AND IT's TRUE, SURE! SURE AS SUGAR, SURE AS SALT, SURE AS RUBIES IN KING DANDO 's VA ULT-EEEEEEEE, HA! I COULD HAVE HAD YOU JUST NOW, BUT WHY BOTHER? I THINK I'd RATHER SEE YOU COME, PISSING AND SHAKING AND UNABLE TO STOP YOURSELF!"
As I will, Roland thought. / won't be able to help myself. I may be able to hold here another ten minutes, perhaps even another twenty, but in the end...
Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come.
Roland shook his head wearily. "Even if I could fight the pull of the thing-and I couldn't, it's all I can do to bide here-retreat would do us no good. Once we're no longer in cover, he'll use whatever else he has. He has something, I'm sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren't likely to stop it."
Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Roland's arm tightened until the boy's fingernails bit into the gunslinger's flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quickjabbing gestures with the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however.
Patrick was pointing at the roses.
"What about them?" Roland asked. "Patrick, what about them?"
This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture.
And this time Roland understood.
NINE
Patrick didn't want to get them. When Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch.
"I'll shoot anything he sends," Roland said. "You've seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could pick it myself, I would. But there's not. So it has to be you who picks the rose and me who gives you cover."
But Patrick only cringed back against the ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was that he didn't know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target.
And Patrick would not. Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the boy-possibly even one-he might have broken through his terror.
But he didn't have that time. Sunset had almost come.
Besides, it's close. I can do it if I have to... and I must.
The weather had warmed enough so there was no need for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one of them and cut off die end, so his two remaining fingers would poke dirough. What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on, then rested on one knee witfi his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The next was fully six feet further away.
Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking his head frantically.
"I have to," Roland said, and of course he did. This was his job, not Patrick's, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown apart here at the edge of Can'-Ka No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would cease.
The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him again, trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Roland's coat and twisted him off-true. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose. The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the rose's song, filling his head and threatening to split his skull.
The stem never did break. In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane.
Close. Very close, that time.
The Crimson King screamed his frustration-
"EEEEEEEEEEE!"-and the cry was followed by multiple approaching whisdes. Patrick pressed himself against the pyramid, face-first. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to make their turn. When they did, he took care of them: one and two and three.
"STILL HERE!"he cried at the old Red King. "STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER, MAY IT DO YA FINE!"
The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but sent no more sneetches.
"SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE!" he screamed. "LISTEN TO IT, ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALA-COME-COME!"
Now that song was all but imperative in Roland's head. It burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped Patrick and turned him around. "Now," he said. "For my life, Patrick. For the lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on."
And child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory.
Jake first hanging over darkness, then falling into it.
He stared into the mute boy's terrified eyes. "Finish it! Show me that you can."
TEN
Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn't cut. Not so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation.
"ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSUNGER, FOR SUNSET's ALMOST NIGH!"
And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn't been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it.
And the rose sang Yes, Roland, yes-you'll have it again. You'll be whole again. There will be renewal. Only come.
Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not.
"WHAT's THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART?"
You 're a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o'clock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.
"Patrick, hurry," he said. "Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up."
Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson King's robe. And the exact color of his lunatic's eyes.
Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: die thorns of diese roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.
It's still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in End-W-
Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger's right hand and peered into it witfi the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood diat flowed there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting... hesitated... looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King's left eye and uien lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gan's face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.
Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.
The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and-to Roland, at least-immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain.
"WHAT's THEE DOING? FFFFFFF! FFFFFFFFi STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
"Now finish the other," Roland said. "Quickly! For your life and mine!"
Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patrick's black-and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell's own fire.
It was done.
Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. "Make him gone," he said. "Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last."
ELEVEN
There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawing-to that curl of nostril-hair, as it happened-the Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And in understanding.
Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. "Aye, Patrick. His time has come and you're to be his executioner. Go on with it."
The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears.
The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur.
They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth's during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs floating three-quarters of the way up the page.
All the rest of him was gone."
TWELVE
The shadow of the pyramid's tip had come to touch the road; now the sky in the west changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron of blood Roland had seen in his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the call of the Tower doubled, then trebled. Roland felt it reach out and grasp him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was come.
Yet there was this boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the end of End-World if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet Patrick had come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally brought him to the Dark Tower. Roland's family was dead; his misbegotten son had been the last. Now would Eld and Tower bejoined.
First, though-or last-this.
"Patrick, listen to me," he said, taking the boy's shoulder with his whole left hand and his mutilated right. "If you'd live to make all the pictures ka has stored away in your future, ask me not a single question nor ask me to repeat a single thing."
The boy looked at him, large-eyed and silent in the red and dying light. And the Song of the Tower rose around them to a mighty shout that was nothing but commala.
"Go back to the road. Pick up all the cans that are whole.
That should be enough to feed you. Go back the way we came.
Never leave the road. You'll do fine."
Patrick nodded with perfect understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good. Belief would protect him even more surely than a revolver, even one with the sandalwood grips.
"Go back to the Federal. Go back to the robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings open on America-side. If it won't open to your hand, draiu it open with thy pencil. Do'ee understand?"
Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood.
"If ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her Roland loves her still, and with all his heart."
He drew Patrick to him and kissed the boy's mouth. "Give her that. Do'ee understand?"
Patrick nodded.
"All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing at the end of the path when all worlds end."
Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now, and for him there would be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Eld's line, the path ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine.
He rose to his feet. The boy looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad. Roland turned. He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.
"NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE GUN OF MY FATHER AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND!"
Patrick watched him stride to where the road ended, a black silhouette against that bloody burning sky. He watched as Roland walked among the roses, and sat shivering in the shadows as Roland began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and ka-mates; those names carried clear in that strange air, as if they would echo forever.
"I come in the name of Steven Deschain, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Gabrielle Deschain, she of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Cortland Andrus, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Cuthbert Allgood, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Alain Johns, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Jamie DeCurry, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Vannay the Wise, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of Hax the Cook, he of Gilead!
"I come in the name of David the hawk, he of Gilead and the sky!
"I come in the name of Susan Delgado, she of Mejis!
"I come in the name of Sheemie Ruiz, he of Mejis!
"I come in the name of Pere Callahan, he of Jerusalem's Lot, and the roads!
"I come in the name of Ted Brautigan, he of America!
"I come in the name of Dinky Earnshaw, he of America!
"I come in the name of Aunt Talidia, she of River Crossing, and will lay her cross here, as I was bid!
"I come in the name of Stephen King, he of Maine!
"I come in the name of Oy, the brave, he of Mid-World!
"I come in the name of Eddie Dean, he of New York!
"I come in the name of Susannah Dean, she of New York!
"I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of New York, whom I call my own true son!
"I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as myself; you will open to me."
After that came the sound of a horn. It simultaneously chilled Patrick's blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into silence. Then, perhaps a minute later, came a great, echoing boom: the sound of a door swinging shut forever.
And after that came silence.
THIRTEEN
Patrick sat where he was at the base of the pyramid, shivering, until Old Star and Old Mother rose in the sky. The song of the roses and the Tower hadn't ceased, but it had grown low and sleepy, little more than a murmur.
At last he went back to the road, gathered as many whole cans as he could (there was a surprising number of them, considering the force of the explosion that had demolished the cart), and found a deerskin sack that would hold them. He realized he had forgotten his pencil and went back to get it.
Beside the pencil, gleaming in the starlight, was Roland's watch.
The boy took it with a small (and nervous) hoot of glee. He put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the road and slung his little sack of gunna over his shoulder.
I can tell you that he walked until nearly midnight, and that he looked at the watch before taking his rest. I can tell you that the watch had stopped completely. I can tell you that, come noon of the following day, he looked at it again and saw that it had begun to run in the correct direction once more, albeit very slowly. But of Patrick I can tell you no more, not whether he made it back to the Federal, not whether he found Stuttering Bill that was, not whether he eventually came once more to America-side. I can tell you none of these things, say sorry.
Here the darkness hides him from my storyteller's eye and he must go on alone.
SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK (EPILOGUE)
No one takes alarm as the little electric cart slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until it's wholly here in Central Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great pre-Christmas snowstorm come skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of '87, the newspapers will call it. Visitors to the park who aren't watching the snowfall begin are watching the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the Harlem School Choir, sometimes called The Harlem Roses in the Post and its rival tabloid, the New York Sun. They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doo-wop harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves, turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the polar bears live their city lives, and the song they're singing is "What Child Is This."
One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well, and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left hand he's holding a large paper cup and she's sure it contains hot chocolate, the good kind mit schlag.
For a moment she's unable to touch the controls of the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick have left her mind. All she can think of is Eddie-
Eddie in front of her right here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not quite, what of that? If Co-Op City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things? It doesn't matter. Only one thing would, and it's that which keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him.
What if he doesn't recognize her?
What if when he turns he sees nothing but a homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as a sat-on hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address
(not in this where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because remembering is just too hurtful?
Worse still, what if he turns to her and she sees the burnedout, fucked-up, empty-eyed stare of the longtime junkie? What if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world white.
Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didn't face Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordiajust to turn tail and run now, did you? Surely you 've got a moit more guts than that.
But she isn't sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslinger's voice speaks to her again, this time sounding wearily amused.
Perhaps there's something you want to get rid of first, Susannah?
She looks down and sees Roland's weapon stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandidds pis tola, or a pirate's cutlass.
She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand... how brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a lover. And she doesn't have to, does she? The question is, what does she love more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one.
On impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their casings dull.
These'll never fire, she thinks... and, without knowing why, or precisely what it means: These are wets.
She sights up the barrel and is queerly saddened-but not surprised-to find that the barrel lets through no light. It's plugged. Has been for decades, from the look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made, after all. This gun is over.
Susannah, still holding the revolver with the sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little electric cart-the one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in her mind-rolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE! stenciled on the side. She tosses Roland's revolver into this litter barrel.
Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. It's heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fast-food wrappers, advertising circulars, and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but she's already become enough of the woman who's waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the job is done.
Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns.
He is indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says i DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!, but she barely registers that. It's him: that's what she registers.
It's Edward Cantor Dean. And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all she has feared.
It's total puzzlement. He doesn't know her.
Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also he's clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.
"Thank God," he says. "I'd just about decided I'd have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That... well..." He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. "Listen, you are here for me, aren't you? Please tell me I'm not making an utter ass of myself.
Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs."
"You're not," she says. "Making an ass of yourself, I mean."
She's remembering Take's story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he was alive. Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices.
"Thank God," he says. 'Your name is Susannah?"
"Yes," she says. "My name is Susannah."
Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least.
She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good.
Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those diings because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened.
Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it's true.
Her memories of
(Mid-World)
the gunslinger's where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know it's all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this.
But at the same time, it's good.
It's a damn miracle, is what it is...
"Are you cold?" he asks.
"No, I'm okay. Why?"
"You shivered."
"It's the sweetness of the cream." Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-dusted foam.
"If you aren't cold now, you will be," he says. "WRKO says the temperature's gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something." From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red: MERRY CHRISTMAS...
"Bought it in Brendio's, on Fifth Avenue," he says.
Susannah has never heard of Brendio's. Brentano's, maybe-the bookstore-but not Brendio's. But of course in the America where she grew up, she never heard of Nozz-A-La or Takuro Spirit automobiles, either. "Did your voices tell you to buy it?" Teasing him a little now.
He blushes. "Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on."
It's a perfect fit.
"Tell me something," she says. "Who's the President? You're not going to tell me it's Ronald Reagan, are you?"
He looks at her incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. "What? That old actor who used to host Death Valley Days on TV? You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. I always thought you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie."
"I don't know what you mean."
"That's okay, just tell me who the President is."
"Gary Hart," he says, as if speaking to a child. "From Colorado.
He almost dropped out of the race in 1980-as I'm sure you know-over that Monkey Business business. Then he said
"Fuck em if they can't take a joke' and hung on in there. Ended up winning in a landslide."
His smile fades a little as he studies her.
"You're not kidding me, are you?"
"Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning?"
Eddie looks almost shocked. "How can you know that?"
"It's a long story. Maybe someday I'll tell you." If I can still remember, she thinks.
"It's not just the voices."
"No?"
"No. I've been dreaming of you. For months now. I've been waiting for you. Listen, we don't know each other... this is crazy... but do you have a place to stay? You don't, do you?"
She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it's Blaine the train she's imitating), she says: "Ah'm a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim."
Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn't know how it can be, but yes, it's going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.
"If I asked how I know you... or where you come from..."
He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it.
"Or how I can possibly love you already...?"
She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts die side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe-she can't quite remember) is gone. "Sugar," she tells him, "it's what I said: a long story. You'll get some of it in time, though... what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation."
She looks around and then says, "What year is this?"
"1987," he says.
"And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?"
The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him here-with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket-bursts out laughing. "God, no! I'm from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He's right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears."
The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie.
Her heart sinks.
"Let me introduce you," he says.
"No, really, I-"
"Hey, if we're gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We're tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!"
She hasn't noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears' environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.
"Jake's been dreaming about you, too," Eddie tells her. "It's the only reason I know I'm not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least."
She takes Eddie's hand-that familiar, well-loved hand.
And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions-so will they-but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.
"You and Jake-what's your last name?"
"Toren," he says. "It's German."
Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.
And they didlive.
Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live.
That's all.
That's enough.
Say thankya.
FOUND (CODA)
ONE
I've told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was
(I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless).
I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-
World. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God's way of telling us we've finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say that is what you paid your money for, the show you came to see.
I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through die pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man (or Manni) can open. I've written many, but most only for the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroom-because it is the custom of the country.
And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last memory be of seeing Eddie,
Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again for the first time, listening to the children's choir sing "What Child Is This."
You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later Oy
(probably a canine version with a long neck, odd gold-ringed eyes, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. That's a pretty picture, isn't it? /think so.
And pretty close to happily ever after, too. Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say.
Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked ?^b?i W^j)- What's behind it won't improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes).
There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time."
Endings are heartless.
Ending is just another word for goodbye.
TWO
Would you still?
See it very well.
Here is the Dark Tower at sunset.
THREE
He came to it with the oddest feeling of remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie called deja vu.
The roses of Can'-Ka No Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow suns deep in their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that gray-black column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he had always known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he had always promised himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with perfect force, for no longer was there any need to reserve energy with which to fight the Tower's pull. To give in-finally-was the greatest relief of his life.
He called the names of his compadres and amoras, and although each came from deeper in his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of him. His voice rolled away to the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He called Eddie's and Susannah's. He called Jake's, and last of all he called his own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it. That horn was the voice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast.
In my dreams the horn was always mine, he thought. / should have known better, for mine was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill.
A voice whispered from above him: It would have been the work of three seconds to bend and pick it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Roland-it ahoays comes back to that.
That was, he thought, the voice of the Beam-the one they had saved. If it spoke out of gratitude it could have saved its breath, for what good were such words to him now? He remembered a line from Browning's poem: One taste of the old times sets all to rights.
Such had never been his experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They were the food of poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat.
Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the Tower's base, letting the voice of the roses-that welcoming horn-echo away to nothing. The feeling of deja vu was still strong, almost as though he had been here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams. He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson King had stood, trying to defy ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons that held the few remaining sneetches
(the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it seemed),
he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking down at him witfi eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the optic nerves (now tinted red-orange with the light of the leaving sun) trailed away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed the Crimson King's eyes would remain up there forever, watching Can'-Ka No Rey while their owner wandered the world to which Patrick's eraser and enchanted Artist's eye had sent him. Or, more likely, to the space between the worlds.
Roland walked on to where the path ended at the steelbanded slab of black ghostwood. Upon it, a sigul that he now knew well was engraved three-quarters of the way up:
Here he laid two things, the last of his gunna: Aunt Talitha's cross, and his remaining sixgun. When he stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away:
UNFOUND had become FOUND.
He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voice-Welcome, Roland, thee of Eld. It was the Tower's voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself, likely, and the pulse he'd felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had always been Gan's beating life-force.
Commala, gunslinger. Commala-come-come.
And wafting out came the smell of alkali, bitter as tears. The smell of... what? What, exactly? Before he could place it the odor was gone, leaving Roland to surmise he had imagined it.
He stepped inside and the Song of the Tower, which he had always heard-even in Gilead, where it had hidden in his mother's voice as she sang him her cradle songs-finally ceased.
There was another sigh. The door swung shut with a boom, but he was not left in blackness. The light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the glow of sunset.
Stone stairs, a passage just wide enough for one person, ascended.
"Now comes Roland," he called, and the words seemed to spiral up into infinity. "Thee at the top, hear and make me welcome if you would. If you're my enemy, know that I come unarmed and mean no ill."
He began to climb.
Nineteen steps brought him to the first landing (and to each one thereafter). A door stood open here and beyond it was a small round room. The stones of its wall were carved with thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was the face of Calvin Tower, peeping slyly over the top of an open book). The faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring.
Welcome Roland, you of the many miles and many worlds; welcome thee ofGilead, thee of Eld.
On the far side of the room was a door flanked by dark red swags traced with gold. About six feet up from the door-at the exact height of his eyes-was a small round window, little bigger than an outlaw's peekhole. There was a sweet smell, and this one he could identify: the bag of pine sachet his mother had placed first in his cradle, then, later, in his first real bed. It brought back those days with great clarity, as aromas always do; if any sense serves us as a time machine, it's that of smell.
Then, like the bitter call of the alkali, it was gone.
The room was unfurnished, but a single item lay on the floor. He advanced to it and picked it up. It was a small cedar clip, its bow wrapped in a bit of blue silk ribbon. He had seen such things long ago, in Gilead; must once have worn one himself. When the sawbones cut a newly arrived baby's umbilical cord, separating mother from child, such a clip was put on above the baby's navel, where it would stay until the remainder of the cord fell off, and the clip with it. (The navel itself was called tet-ka can Gan.) The bit of silk on this one told that it had belonged to a boy. A girl's clip would have been wrapped with pink ribbon.
"Twos my own, he thought He regarded it a moment longer, fascinated, then put it carefully back where it had been. Where it belonged.
When he stood up again, he saw a baby's face
(Can this be my darling bah-bo? If you say so, let it be so!)
among the multitude of odiers. It was contorted, as if its first breath of air outside the womb had not been to its liking, already fouled with death. Soon it would pronounce judgment on its new situation with a squall that would echo throughout the apartments of Steven and Gabrielle, causing those friends and servants who heard it to smile with relief. (Only Marten Broadcloak would scowl.) The birthing was done, and it had been a livebirth, tell Gan and all the gods thankya. There was an heir to the Line of Eld, and thus there was still the barest outside chance that the world's rueful shuffle toward ruin might be reversed.
Roland left that room, his sense of dejd vu stronger than ever. So was the sense that he had entered the body of Gan himself.
He turned to the stairs and once more began to climb.
FOUR
Anouier nineteen steps took him to the second landing and the second room. Here bits of cloth were scattered across the circular floor. Roland had no question that diey had once been an infant's clout, torn to shreds by a certain petulant interloper, who had then gone out onto the balcony for a look back at the field of roses and found himself betaken. He was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom... but in the end he had slipped, and now he would pay forever and ever.
If it was only a look he wanted, why did he bring his ammunition with him when he stepped out1?
Because it was his only gunna, and slung over his back, whispered one of the faces carved into the curve of the wall. This was the face of Mordred. Roland saw no hatefulness there now but only the lonely sadness of an abandoned child. That face was as lonesome as a train-whistle on a moonless night. There had been no clip for Mordred's navel when he came into the world, only the mother he had taken for his first meal. No clip, never in life, for Mordred had never been part of Gan's tet. No, not he.
My Red Father would never go unarmed, whispered the stone boy. Not once he was away from his castle. He was mad, but never that mad.
In this room was the smell of talc put on by his mother while he lay naked on a towel, fresh from his bath and playing with his newly discovered toes. She had soothed his skin with it, singing as she caressed him: Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here!
This smell too was gone as quickly as it had come.
Roland crossed to the little window, walking among the shredded bits of diaper, and looked out. The disembodied eyes sensed him and rolled over giddily to regard him. That gaze was poisonous with fury and loss.
Come out, Roland! Come out and face me one to one! Man to man!
An eye for an eye, may it do ya!
"I think not," Roland said, "for I have more work to do. A little more, even yet."
It was his last word to the Crimson King. Although the lunatic screamed thoughts after him, he screamed in vain, for Roland never looked back. He had more stairs to climb and more rooms to investigate on his way to the top.
FIVE
On the third landing he looked through the door and saw a corduroy dress that had no doubt been his when he'd been only a year old. Among the faces on this wall he saw that of his father, but as a much younger man. Later on that face had become cruel-events and responsibilities had turned it so. But not here. Here, Steven Deschain's eyes were those of a man looking on something that pleases him more than anything else ever has, or ever could. Here Roland smelled a sweet and husky aroma he knew for the scent of his father's shaving soap. A phantom voice whispered, Look, Gabby, look you! He's smiling!
Smiling at me! And he's got a new tooth!
On the floor of the fourth room was the collar of his first dog, Ring-A-Levio. Ringo, for short. He'd died when Roland was three, which was something of a gift. A boy of three was still allowed to weep for a lost pet, even a boy with the blood of Eld in his veins. Here the gunslinger that was smelled an odor that was wonderful but had no name, and knew it for the smell of the Full Earth sun in Ringo's fur.
Perhaps two dozen floors above Ringo's Room was a scattering of breadcrumbs and a limp bundle of feathers that had once belonged to a hawk named David-no pet he, but certainly a friend. The first of Roland's many sacrifices to the Dark Tower. On one section of the wall Roland saw David carved in flight, his stubby wings spread above all the gathered court of Gilead (Marten die Enchanter not least among them).
And to the left of the door leading onto the balcony, David was carved again. Here his wings were folded as he fell upon Cort like a blind bullet, heedless of Cort's upraised stick.
Old times.
Old times and old crimes.
Not far from Cort was the laughing face of the whore with whom the boy had sported that night. The smell in David's Room was her perfume, cheap and sweet. As the gunslinger drew it in, he remembered touching the whore's pubic curls and was shocked to remember now what he had remembered then, as his fingers slid toward her slicky-sweet cleft: being fresh out of his baby's bath, with his mother's hands upon him.
He began to grow hard, and Roland fled that room in fear.
SIX
There was no more red to light his way now, only the eldritch blue glow of the windows-glass eyes that were alive, glass eyes that looked upon the gunless intruder. Outside the Dark Tower, the roses of Can'-Ka No Rey had closed for another day. Part of his mind marveled that he should be here at all; that he had one by one surmounted the obstacles placed in his path, as dreadfully single-minded as ever. I'm like one of the old people's robots, he thought. One that will either accomplish the task for which it has been made or beat itself to death trying.
Another part of him was not surprised at all, however. This was the part that dreamed as the Beams themselves must, and this darker self thought again of the horn that had fallen from Cuthbert's fingers-Cvithbert, who had gone to his death laughing. The horn that might to this very day lie where it had fallen on the rocky slope of Jericho Hill.
And of course I've seen these rooms before! They're telling my life, after all.
Indeed they were. Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted Roland Deschain's life and quest. Each held its memento; each its signature aroma. Many times there was more than a single floor devoted to a single year, but there was always at least one. And after the thirty-eighth room (which is nineteen doubled, do ya not see it), he wished to look no more. This one contained the charred stake to which Susan Delgado had been bound. He did not enter, but looked at the face upon the wall. That much he owed her. Roland, I love theel Susan Delgado had screamed, and he knew it was the truth, for it was only her love that rendered her recognizable. And, love or no love, in the end she had still burned.
This is a place of death, he thought, and not just here. All these rooms. Every floor.
Yes, gunslinger, whispered the Voice of the Tower. But only because your life has made it so.
After the thirty-eighth floor, Roland climbed faster.
SEVEN
Standing outside, Roland had judged the Tower to be roughly six hundred feet high. But as he peered into the hundredth room, and then the two hundredth, he felt sure he must have climbed eight times six hundred. Soon he would be closing in on the mark of distance his friends from America-side had called a mile. That was more floors than there possibly could be-no Tower could be a mile high!-but still he climbed, climbed until he was nearly running, yet never did he tire. It once crossed his mind that he'd never reach the top; that the Dark Tower was infinite in height as it was eternal in time. But after a moment's consideration he rejected the idea, for it was his life the Tower was telling, and while that life had been long, it had by no means been eternal. And as it had had a beginning (marked by the cedar clip and the bit of blue silk ribbon), so it would have an ending.
Soon now, quite likely.
The light he sensed behind his eyes was brighter now, and did not seem so blue. He passed a room containing Zoltan, the bird from the weed-eater's hut. He passed a room containing the atomic pump from the Way Station. He climbed more stairs, paused outside a room containing a dead lobstrosity, and by now the light he sensed was much brighter and no longer blue.
It was...
He was quite sure it was...
It was sunlight. Past twilight it might be, with Old Star and Old Mother shining from above the Dark Tower, but Roland was quite sure he was seeing-or sensing-sunlight.
He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms, without bothering to smell their aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now, unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing.
He passed one final open door. Lying on the floor of the tiny room beyond it was a pad from which the face had been erased. All that remained were two red eyes, glaring up.
I have reached the present. I have reached now.
Yes, and there was sunlight, commala sunlight inside his eyes and waiting for him. It was hot and harsh upon his skin. The sound of the wind was louder, and that sound was also harsh.
Unforgiving. Roland looked at the stairs curving upward; now his shoulders would touch the walls, for the passage was no wider than the sides of a coffin. Nineteen more stairs, and then the room at the top of the Dark Tower would be his.
"I come!" he called. "If'ee hear me, hear me well! I come!"
He took the stairs one by one, walking with his back straight and his head held up. The other rooms had been open to his eye. The final one was closed off, his way blocked by a ghostwood door with a single word carved upon it. That word was ROLAND.
He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild rose wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his father and now lost forever.
Yet it will be yours again, whispered the voice of the Tower and the voice of the roses-these voices were now one.
What do you mean?
To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower.
He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time's curse lifted), but to that moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan?
How many times would he travel it?
"Oh, no!" he screamed. "Please, not again! Have pity! Have mercy!"
The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the Tower knew no mercy.
They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they knew no mercy.
He smelled alkali, bitter as tears. The desert beyond the door was white; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon. The smell beneath the alkali was that of the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.
But not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct.
May I be brutally frankfYou go on.
And each time you forget the last time. For you, each time is the first time.
He made one final effort to draw back: hopeless. Ka was stronger.
Roland of Gilead walked through the last door, the one he always sought, the one he always found. It closed gently behind him.
EIGHT
The gunslinger paused for a moment, swaying on his feet. He thought he'd almost passed out. It was the heat, of course; the damned heat. There was a wind, but it was dry and brought no relief. He took his waterskin, judged how much was left by the heft of it, knew he shouldn't drink-it wasn't time to drink-and had a swallow, anyway.
For a moment he had felt he was somewhere else. In the Tower itself, mayhap. But of course the desert was tricky, and full of mirages. The Dark Tower still lay thousands of wheels ahead. That sense of having climbed many stairs and looked into many rooms where many faces had looked back at him was already fading.
I will reach it, he thought, squinting up at the pitiless sun. I swear on the name of my father that I will.
And perhaps this time if you get there it will be different, a voice whispered-surely the voice of desert delirium, for what other time had there ever been? He was what he was and where he was, just that, no more than that, no more. He had no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was steadfast. He was gunslinger. And in his heart, well-hidden, he still felt the bitter romance of the quest.
You 're the one who never changes, Cort had told him once, and in his voice Roland could have sworn he heard fear... although why Cort should have been afraid of him-a boy-Roland couldn't tell. It'll be your damnation, boy. You'll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your xoalk to hell.
And Vannay: Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
And his mother: Roland, must you always be so serious? Can you never rest?
Yet the voice whispered it again
(different this time mayhap different)
and Roland did seem to smell something other than alkali and devil-grass. He thought it might be flowers.
He thought it might be roses.
He shifted his gunna from one shoulder to the other, then touched the horn that rode on his belt behind the gun on his right hip. The ancient brass horn had once been blown by Arthur Eld himself, or so the story did say. Roland had given it to Cuthbert Allgood at Jericho Hill, and when Cuthbert fell,
Roland had paused just long enough to pick it up again, knocking the deathdust of that place from its throat.
This is your sigul, whispered the fading voice that bore with it the dusk-sweet scent of roses, the scent of home on a summer evening-O lost!-a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door.
This is your promise that things may be different, Roland-that there may yet be rest. Even salvation.
A pause, and then:
If you stand. If you are true.
He shook his head to clear it, thought of taking another sip of water, and dismissed the idea. Tonight. When he built his campfire over the bones of Walter's fire. Then he would drink.
As for now...
As for now, he would resume his journey. Somewhere ahead CODA 830
was the Dark Tower. Closer, however, much closer, was the man (was he a man? was he really?) who could perhaps tell him how to get there. Roland would catch him, and when he did, that man would talk-aye, yes, yar, tell it on the mountain as you'd hear it in the valley: Walter would be caught, and Walter would talk.
Roland touched the horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched it before.
Time to get moving.
The man in black fled across die desert, and the gunslinger followed.
June 19, 1970-April 7, 2004:
Tell God thankya.