The Dark Tower (Page 123)

There’s something on her head, too, pulled down over her ears and keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the cap off, curious, and sees it’s not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, but a red-and-green stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yar, and you must beware ofDandelo," says Jake.

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

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

"No more twins," says Jake. "There’s only one hat, doya not see."

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

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

(Wednesday)

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

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

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

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

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

"I don’t understand you."

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

Chapter V:JOE COLLINS OF ODD’S LANE

ONE

Three weeks after the dream of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more woods below.

One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more sled than travois.

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

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

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

"Television," Susannah said. "There used to be this program I watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Sergeant Preston didn’t have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he did have his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the guy’s snowshoes looked like." She pointed to the ones Roland was wearing. "That’s the best I could do."

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

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

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

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

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

"To stay warm?" To Susannah this seemed hard to believe.

There were trees all around them.

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

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

"It’s not guessing, but I can’t explain it. If it’s the touch,

Susannah, it’s not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although… do you believe we have dreams sometimes we don’t remember after we awaken?"

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

"Mayhap I see him and hear him in those," Roland said.

"All I know is that he’s struggling to keep up. He knows so litde about the world that it’s really a wonder he’s still alive at all."

"Do you feel sorry for him?"

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

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

There was something else, however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She knew, because she could now feel it beating in her own head, bodi sleeping and waking. It was the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now.

She had no idea what they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got there, but she found she no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was to see it. The idea of entering it was still more than her imagination could deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that. And she thought that seeing it would be enough.

TWO

They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland’s heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again.