Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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