The Dark Tower (Page 133)

Ahead of her, Roland stopped. "Tears of my mother," he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal’s living eyes out of their sockets.

She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.

In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar-the southeast corner, if she had her directions right-there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct i t… but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on die acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach-left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt-was a large and old-fashioned

(dad-a-chum dad-a-chee)

silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-

camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do.

Something like that was in Patrick Danville’s eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises.

Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!

Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door.

One of Danville’s hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long-it hung all the way to his shoulders-but there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.

"No offense, Patrick," Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. "Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?"

The scrawny thing in the dirtyjeans and billowing gray shirt

(it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder: I-YEEE! I-YOWK! IYEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful head-banging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, long-fingered hands again, as if for succor.

Roland looked to Susannah.

She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing in the corner uttered its weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense.

"No, honey." This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected. "No, honey, Ah ain’ goan hurt you, if Ah meant t’do dat, Ah’d just put two in yo’ haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs."

She saw something in his eyes-perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. "Dass ri’! Mistuh Collins, he daid. He ain’ nev’ goan come down he’ no mo an… whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick?"

Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest.

"Whuh he do t’you, boy?"

It was no good. He didn’t understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter.

"He make you laugh?"

Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose.

"He make you cry, too."

Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going ho-ho-ho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and making smack-smack sounds with his lips.

From above and slightly behind her, Roland said: "He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made you eat."

Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner.

"He ate," Detta said. "Dass whut you trine t’say, ain’t it?

Dandeloate."

Patrick nodded eagerly.

"He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do!"

Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if the head-banging started again. It didn’t. When she reached die boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept.

Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes i that he could come in now.

When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration.

"Don’t you worry," Susannah said-Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. "He’s not going to get you,

Patrick, he’s dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth."

Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she hated to see even more. It was shame.

"Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth."

He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head of a mop.

Roland said, "What-"

"Hush," she told him. "Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we’ll take you out of here and you’ll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo’s dinner again."

Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoner’s voice-or the words it articulated, anyway-and had pulled it out.

SEVEN

Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boy’s gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the hut’s only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins’s heavy parka hung on the hook in the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of Dandelo-Joe Collins that was-they had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow.

She said, "Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there… Patrick was his cow. There’s two ways you can take nourishment from a cow: meat or milk.

The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts, and then the stew, it’s gone. If youjust take the milk, though, you can go on forever… always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then."

"How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?" Roland asked.

"I don’t know." But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. "A fairly long time, anyway.

What must have seemed like forever to him."

"And it hurt."

"Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid’s tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is."

Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. "We can’t take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I’m sure it would kill him."

Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the house. That might kill her.

Roland agreed when she said so. "We’ll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It’ll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back."

"You’d kill them both?"

"Aye, if I could. Do’ee have a problem with that?"

She considered it, then shook her head.

"All right. Let’s put together what we’d take out there, for we’ll have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four."

EIGHT

It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.