The Dark Tower

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.