Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Three

There was a small motor at the rear of the rickshaw, but both saw at a glance it had been

ages since it had run. In the storeroom Roland found a few simple tools, including an

adjustable wrench. It was frozen with its jaw open, but an application of oil (in what was to Susannah a very familiar red-and-black 3-In-1 can) got it working again. Roland used the

wrench to unbolt the motor from its mounts and then tumbled it off the side. While he

worked and Susannah did what Daddy Mose would have called the heavy looking-on, Oy

sat forty paces outside the arch through which they had exited, clearly on guard against the

thing that had followed them in the dark.

“No more than fifteen pounds,” Roland said, wiping his hands on his jeans and looking at

the tumbled motor, “but I reckon I’ll be glad we got rid of it by the time we’re done with

this thing.”

“When do we start?” she asked.

“As soon as we’ve loaded as much canned stuff into the back as I think I can carry,” he

said, and fetched a heavy sigh. His face was pale and stubbly. There were dark circles

beneath his eyes, new lines carving his cheeks and descending to his jaw from the corners

of his mouth. He looked as thin as a whip.

“Roland, you can’t! Not so soon! You’re done up!”

He gestured at Oy, sitting so patiently, and at the maw of darkness forty paces beyond him.

“Do you want to be this close to that hole when dark comes?”

“We can build a fire—”

“It may have friends,” he said, “that aren’t shy of fire. While we were in yonder shaft, that thing wouldn’t have wanted to share us because it didn’t think ithad to share. Now it might

not care, especially if it’s vengeance-minded.”

“A thing like that can’t think. Surely not.” This was easier to believe now that they were

out. But she knew she might change her mind once the shadows began to grow long and

pool together.

“I don’t think it’s a chance we can afford to take,” Roland said.

She decided, very reluctantly, that he was right.

Four

Luckily for them, this first stretch of the narrow path winding into the Badlands was

mostly level, and when theydid come to an uphill stretch, Roland made no objection to

Susannah’s getting out and hopping gamely along behind what she had dubbed Ho Fat’s

Luxury Taxi until they reached the crest of the hill. Little by little, Castle Discordia fell behind them. Roland kept going after the rocks had blocked the blasted tower from their

view, but when the other one was gone as well, he pointed to a stony bower beside the path

and said, “That’s where we’ll camp tonight, unless you have objections.”

She had none. They’d brought along enough bones and khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn’t last long. The bits of cloth would burn as rapidly as

newspaper and the bones would be gone before the hands of Roland’s fancy new watch

(which he had shown her with something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And

tomorrow night there would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the

cans. She was aware that things could have been ever so much worse—she put the daytime

temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and theydid have food—but she would have

given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of longjohns.

“Probably we’ll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go along,” she said hopefully

once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind). “Weeds…bushes…more bones…maybe even deadwood.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not on this side of the Crimson King’s castle. Not even

devilgrass, which grows damned near anywhere in Mid-World.”

“You don’t know that. Not for sure.” She couldn’t bear thinking about days and days of

unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging than a spring

day in Central Park.

“I think he murdered this land when he darkened Thunderclap,” Roland mused. “It

probably wasn’t much of a shake to begin with, and it’s sterile now. But count your

blessings.” He reached over and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside

her full lower lip. “A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten

your skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you died.”

“Cancer? Radiation?”

Roland shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter. “Somewhere beyond the Crimson King’s

castle we may come to grasslands and even forests again, but the grass will likely be buried

under snow when we get there, for the season’s wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the day’s darkening so quickly.”

She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what came out was a sound of fear and

weariness so real that it frightened her. Oy pricked up his ears and looked around at them.

“Why don’t you cheer me up a little, Roland?”

“You need to know the truth,” he said. “We can get on as we are for a good long while,

Susannah, but it isn’t going to be pleasant. We have food enough in yonder cart to keep us

for a month or more, if we stretch it out…and we will. When we come again to land that’s

alive, we’ll find animals even if thereis snow. And that’s what I want. Not because we’ll be

hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we’ll need the hides. I hope

we won’t need them desperately, that it won’t be that near a thing, but—”

“But you’re afraid it will.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it will. For over a long period of time there’s little in life so disheartening as constant cold—not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing

your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I’m afraid we’re in for a

very hard stretch. You’ll see.”

She did.

Five

There’s little in life that’s so disheartening as constant cold.

The days weren’t so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their

blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they sometimes came

to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock and between the

occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying blue sky like the red fingers of

otherwise buried stone giants. The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged

below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her

chapped hands up to shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go

completely numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes

would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These

tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn’t that bad. It was just deep enough to make their lives a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have sold her immortal soul during

those unpleasant days and horrible nights? Sometimes she thought a single sweater would

have purchased it; at other times she thoughtNo, honey, you got too much self-respect,

even now. Would you be willing to spend an eternity in hell—or maybe in the todash

darkness—for a single sweater? Surely not!

Well,maybe not. But if the devil tempting her were to throw in a pair of earmuffs—

And it would have taken so little, really, to make them comfortable. She thought of this

constantly. They had the food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals

along the path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of

mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands.

Badlands. She had hours and days and, ultimately, weeks to meditate on that word. What

made lands bad? Poisoned water? The water out here wasn’t sweet, not by any means, but

it wasn’t poisoned, either. Lack of food? They had food, although she guessed it might

become a problem later on, if they didn’t find more. In the meantime she was getting

almighty tired of corned beef hash, not to mention raisins for breakfast and raisins if you

wanted dessert. Yet it was food. Body-gasoline. What made the Badlands bad when you

had food and water? Watching the sky turn first gold and then russet in the west; watching

it turn purple and then starshot black in the east. She watched the days end with increasing

dread: the thought of another endless night, the three of them huddled together while the

wind whined and twined its way through the rocks and the stars glared down. Endless