The Dark Tower (Page 131)

"Stop!" he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicada’s buzz. "I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!"

"Heard it," she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye.

TWO

Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn’t want to know, as long as it didn’t make her sick. As long as it wasn’t poisonous.

Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo’s glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostat-a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartnient-was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and rilled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.

The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages-almost arms and legs-sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse dian Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.

The tidy, well-lit cottage-like something out of a fairytale, and hadn’t she seen that from the first?-was now a dim and smoky peasant’s hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.

"Roland, are you all right?"

Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still.

"Gunslinger, I was ‘mazed," Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. "I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon."

"Roland, no! Git up!" That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought,

It’s a wonder I didn’t say "Git up, honky, "and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.

"Give me pardon, first," Roland said, not looking at her.

She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn’t stand to see him on his knees like diat. "Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart." She paused, then added: "If I save your life another nine times, we’ll be somewhere close to even."

He said, ‘Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,"

and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close litde hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.

"What he fed us was all right," he said. It was as if he’d read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. "He’d never poison what he meant to… eat."

She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut’s door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the litde entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a litde less like a sauna.

"How did you know?" he asked.

She thought back to die hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen.

Later on, after they’d left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and

(dad-a-chee)

a key. Jake’s name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she’d found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both.

According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza-Park Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King.

"Come with me," she said. "Into the bathroom."

THREE

Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used…

Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used. The shower-head was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that she hadn’t cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime: 0W? lAt/B, and, below that, amp;Wfc??O.

"It’s an anagram," she said. "Do you see?"

He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed.

"Not your fault, Roland. They’re our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it, it’s an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don’t know if it was Dandelo’s idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King."

"You figured it out," he said. "I was busy laughing myself to death."

"We both would have done that," she said. ‘You were just a litde more vulnerable because your sense of humor… forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, it’s pretty lame."

"I know tfiat," he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room.

A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. "Roland, is he still…?"

He nodded, smiling a litde. "Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure."

"I’m glad," she said simply.

"Oy’s standing guard. If anything were to happen, I’m sure he’d let us know." He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine cabinet. "’I’ve left you something.’ Do you know what?"

She shook her head. "I didn’t have time to look."

"Where is this medicine cabinet?"

She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to Susannah like the world’s oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops.

There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:

$ amp;e?(

"Childe?" she asked. "Does that mean anything to you?"

He nodded. "It’s a term that describes a knight-or a gunslinger-on a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven’t thought of myself so in many years."

"Yet you are Childe Roland?"

"Perhaps once I was. We’re beyond such things now.

Beyond ka."

"But still on the Path of the Beam."

"Aye." He traced the last line on the envelope: All debts are paid. "Open it, Susannah, for I’d see what’s inside."

She did.

FOUR

It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet’s name in his half-script, half-printing above the title. Susannah had read some of Browning’s dramatic monologues in college, but she wasn’t familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic (a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. Someone-King, presumably-had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI.

"Read the marked ones," he said hoarsely, "because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well."

"Stanza the First," she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture.