Four
“Watch out for Dandelo.”
She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early not-quite-dawn light.
And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no other. She felt her cheeks and wiped
away the wetness there. It wasn’t quite cold enough to freeze the tears to her skin, but
just-a-damn-bout.
She looked around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing with all her heart that
her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she’d had to sleep on the floor—the
bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting to disintegrate—and her back was
stiff. For another, the blankets she’d used as a makeshift mattress and the ones she’d
wrapped around her had all torn to rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with
their dust, tickling her nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming
down with the world’s worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to
pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed hands.
And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes Dean this
morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a beautiful dream to a
world
(this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead)
where she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it. The problem was that the
place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The problem was that she
was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck and depressed. The problem was
that, in this hour before dawn, in this frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air
was full of musty blanket-fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had
been squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back.
She wanted Eddie.
“I see you’re up, too,” said a voice, and Susannah whirled around, pivoting on her hands
so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had woven the
straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar, and it hung over his left shoulder. Hung over his right was a leather sack filled with their new possessions and the
remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland’s feet, looking at her solemnly.
“You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai Deschain,” she said.
“You’ve been crying.”
“Isn’t any of your nevermind if I have been or if I haven’t.”
“We’ll feel better once we’re out of here,” he said. “Fedic’s curdled.”
She knew exactly what he meant. The wind had kicked up fierce in the night, and when it
screamed around the eaves of the hotel and the saloon next door, it had sounded to
Susannah like the screams of children—wee ones so lost in time and space they would
never find their way home.
“All right, but Roland—before we cross the street and go into that Dogan, I want your
promise on one thing.”
“What promise would you have?”
“If something looks like getting us—some monster out of the Devil’s Arse or one from the
todash between-lands—you put a bullet in my head before it happens. When it comes to
yourself you can do whatever you want, but…what? What are you holding that out for?” It
was one of his revolvers.
“Because I’m only really good with one of them these days. And because I won’t be the
one to take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however—”
“Roland, your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me,” she said. Then she took the
gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. “As for that thing, if you think I’m gonna ride in it before I have to, you’re crazy.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “It’s better when it’s the two of us, isn’t it?”
She sighed, then nodded. “A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let’s blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses.”
Five
He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it
as far as the first set of stairs, Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap.
At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on
his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to
the bottom.
“That’s the end ofthat, ” she said when the echoes had finally ceased. “You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it’s going to do me now.”
“We’ll see,” Roland said, starting down. “You might be surprised.”
“That thing ain’t gonna work fo’ shit an we bofe know it,” Detta said. Oy uttered a short,
sharp bark, as if to sayThat’s right.
Six
The chairdid survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland
hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and
extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded
him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they’d come upon it after
the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.
“There, now, dint I tell you?” she asked, and cackled. “Reckon it’s time to start totin dat
barge, Roland!”
He eyed her. “Can you make Detta go away?”
She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said.
She flushed. “Yes,” she said in a remarkably small voice. “Say sorry, Roland.”
He picked her up and got her settled into the harness. Then they went on. As unpleasant as
it was beneath the Dogan—ascreepy as it was beneath the Dogan—Susannah was glad that
they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it
behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western
Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn’t think they had to
worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for
the Dark Tower.
The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey,
and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on
her way to Roland’s obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of
existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn’ttodash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps therewas
an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might
be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the
first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY
and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate.Mit schlag.
Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?
Seven
They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the
wide passage with the sign on the wall readingSHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE
PASS NOT ACCEPTED . A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working
fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on
the tile wall and detoured down to read it.
Under the main message they had signed their names: Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov,
Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in
another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted’s, and reading them made her feel like crying:
“God love em,” Susannah said hoarsely. “May God love and keep em all.”
“Keep-um,” said a small and rather timid voice from Roland’s heel. They looked down.
“Decided to talk again, sugarpie?” Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was
weeks before he spoke again.
Eight
Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and
passages—some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and
more menacing—and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds
Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl
had brought plenty with her. (“Although not one single change of clothes,” Susannah said
with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door
that looked to Roland like the ones he’d found on the beach, they heard an