Stephen King – The Dark Tower

realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.

Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needle-gardens of rock, but Susannah had

taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they

could now read the occasional sign which proclaimed this to beTHE KING’S WAY (with

the eye, of course; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still on

Badlands Avenue.

It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine what species of freakish

people might once have lived here. The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were

narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of

narrow folk seen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses,

Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed

together under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills

that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had collapsed, and

there was an unpleasantlyorganic look to these ruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh

instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces

peering at her from some configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate

in the rubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the

Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.

On their fourth night on The King’s Way, they came to a major intersection where the main road made a crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the

Beam. Ahead, less than a night’s walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho Fat’s

Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it. In the chancy

moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers bulged at the tops, as if

wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways flew between them, crisscrossing

above the courtyard in front of the castle proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She

asked Roland about it.

“Water,” he said.

“What water? Do you have any idea?”

He shook his head. “But I’d not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying

of thirst.”

“This place is bad,” she muttered, meaning not just the castle but the nameless village of

leaning

(leering)

houses that had grown up all around it. “And Roland—it’s not empty.”

“Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy head—knocking or

gnawing—then bid them away.”

“Will that work?”

“I’m not sure it will,” he admitted, “but I’ve heard that such things must be granted entry,

and that they’re wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse.”

She had readDracula as well as heard Pere Callahan’s story of Jerusalem’s Lot, and

understood what Roland meant all too well.

He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her away from the castle—which might not

be naturally black after all, she had decided, but only tarnished by the years. Daylight

would tell. For the present their way was lit by a cloud-scummed quarter-moon.

Several other roads led away from the place where they had stopped, most as crooked as

broken fingers. The one Roland wanted her to look upon was straight, however, and

Susannah realized it was the onlycompletely straight street she had seen since the deserted

village began to grow silently up around their way. It was smoothly paved rather than

cobbled and pointed southeast, along the Path of the Beam. Above it flowed the

moon-gilded clouds like boats in a procession.

“Does thee glimpse a darkish blur at the horizon, dear?” he murmured.

“Yes. A dark blur and a whitish band in front of it. What is it? Do you know?”

“I have an idea, but I’m not sure,” Roland said. “Let’s have us a rest here. Dawn’s not far

off, and then we’ll both see. And besides, I don’t want to approach yonder castle at night.”

“If the Crimson King’s gone, and if the Path of the Beam lies that way—” She pointed.

“Why do we need to go to his damn old castle at all?”

“To make sure heis gone, for one thing,” Roland said. “And we may be able to trap the one

behind us. I doubt it—he’s wily—but there’s a chance. He’s also young, and the young are

sometimes careless.”

“You’d kill him?”

Roland’s smile was wintry in the moonlight. Merciless. “Without a moment’s hesitation,”

said he.

Eight

In the morning Susannah woke from an uncomfortable doze amid the scattered supplies in

the back of the rickshaw and saw Roland standing in the intersection and looking along the

Path of the Beam. She got down, moving with great care because she was stiff and didn’t

want to fall. She imagined her bones cold and brittle inside her flesh, ready to shatter like glass.

“What do you see?” he asked her. “Now that it’s light, what do you see over that way?”

The whitish band was snow, which did not surprise her given the fact that those were true

uplands. What did surprise her—and gladdened her heart more than she would have

believed possible—were the trees beyond the band of snow. Green fir-trees.Living things .

“Oh, Roland, they look lovely!” she said. “Even with their feet in the snow, they look

lovely! Don’t they?”

“Yes,” he said. He lifted her high and turned her back the way they had come. Beyond the

nasty crowding suburb of dead houses she could see some of the Badlands they’d come

through, all those crowding spines of rock broken by the occasional butte or mesa.

“Think of this,” he said. “Back yonder as you look is Fedic. Beyond Fedic, Thunderclap.

Beyond Thunderclap, the Callas and the forest that marks the borderland between

Mid-World and End-World. Lud is further back that way, and River Crossing further still;

the Western Sea and the great Mohaine Desert, too. Somewhere back there, lost in the

leagues and lost in time as well is what remains of In-World. The Baronies. Gilead. Places

where even now there are people who remember love and light.”

“Yes,” she said, not understanding.

“That was the way the Crimson King turned to cast his petulance,” Roland said. “Hemeant

to go the other way, ye must ken, to the Dark Tower, and even in his madness he knew

better than to kill the land he must pass through, he and whatever band of followers he took

with him.” He drew her toward him and kissed her forehead with a tenderness that made

her feel like crying. “We three will visit his castle, and trap Mordred there if our fortune is good and his is ill. Then we’ll go on, and back into living lands. There’ll be wood for fires and game to provide fresh food and hides to wrap around us. Can you go on a little longer,

dear? Canthee? ”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Roland.”

She hugged him, and as she did, she looked toward the red castle. In the growing light she

could see that the stone of which it had been made, although darkened by the years, had

once been the color of spilled blood. This called forth a memory of her palaver with Mia on

the Castle Discordia allure, a memory of steadily pulsing crimson light in the distance.

Almost from where they now were, in fact.

Come to me now, if you’d come at all, Susannah,Mia had told her.For the King can

fascinate, even at a distance .

It was that pulsing red glow of which she had been speaking, but—

“It’s gone!” she said to Roland. “The red light from the castle—Forge of the King, she

called it! It’s gone!We haven’t seen it once in all this time! ”

“No,” he said, and this time his smile was warmer. “I believe it must have stopped at the

same time we ended the Breakers’ work. The Forge of the King has gone out, Susannah.

Forever, if the gods are good. That much we have done, although it has cost us much.”

That afternoon they came to Le Casse Roi Russe, which turned out not to be entirely

deserted, after all.

Chapter III:

The Castle of the Crimson King

One

They were a mile from the castle and the roar of the unseen river had become very loud

when bunting and posters began to appear. The bunting consisted of red, white, and blue

swags—the kind Susannah associated with Memorial Day parades and small-town Main

Streets on the Fourth of July. On the façades of these narrow, secretive houses and the

fronts of shops long closed and emptied from basement to attic, such decoration looked like

rouge on the cheeks of a decaying corpse.

The faces on the posters were all too familiar to her. Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot