she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little
cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on
the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And
dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn’t want
to know, as long as it didn’t make her sick. As long as it wasn’t poisonous.
Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it
against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent
forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested
material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his
shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo’s glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the
thermostat—a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York
apartment—was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it
would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip
of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and filled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There
was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.
The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked
like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages—almost arms and legs—sticking out of
the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the
middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human
features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse than Mordred
in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.
The tidy, well-lit cottage—like something out of a fairy-tale, and hadn’t she seen that from
the first?—was now a dim and smoky peasant’s hut. There were still electric lights, but
they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel.
The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in
places.
“Roland, are you all right?”
Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what
was really happening, she was more alarmed still.
“Gunslinger, I was ’mazed,” Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. “I was taken in like
a child, and I cry your pardon.”
“Roland, no! Git up!” That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah
was under great strain. She thought,It’s a wonder I didn’t say “Git up, honky,” and had to
choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.
“Give me pardon, first,” Roland said, not looking at her.
She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn’t stand to see him
on his knees like that. “Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart.” She paused, then added: “If I save your life another nine times, we’ll be somewhere close to even.”
He said, “Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,” and rose to his feet. The
terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its
grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close little
hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.
“What he fed us was all right,” he said. It was as if he’d read her mind and seen the worst
fear that it held. “He’d never poison what he meant to…eat.”
She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty
chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut’s door was still open and snow
came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the little entryway, where their
makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a little less like a sauna.
“How did you know?” he asked.
She thought back to the hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen. Later on, after they’d left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a
note and
(dad-a-chee)
a key. Jake’s name andThis is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of
cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she’d found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand
made both.
According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza–Park Hotel had told them the
message had been left by a man named Stephen King.
“Come with me,” she said. “Into the bathroom.”
Three
Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The
tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used…
Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it hadnever been used. The shower-head
was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were
no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought
it was sort of a wonder that she hadn’t cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime:ODD LANE, and,
below that,DANDELO.
“It’s an anagram,” she said. “Do you see?”
He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed.
“Not your fault, Roland. They’re our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it,
it’s an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don’t know if it was
Dandelo’s idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to
follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King.”
“Youfigured it out,” he said. “I was busy laughing myself to death.”
“We both would have done that,” she said. “You were just a little more vulnerable because
your sense of humor…forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, it’s pretty lame.”
“I know that,” he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room.
A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger
came back. “Roland, is he still…?”
He nodded, smiling a little. “Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at
once I needed to be sure.”
“I’m glad,” she said simply.
“Oy’s standing guard. If anythingwere to happen, I’m sure he’d let us know.” He picked
the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only
term she had to help him with wasmedicine cabinet . “ ‘I’ve left you something.’ Do you
know what?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to look.”
“Where is this medicine cabinet?”
She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed
shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there
were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what
looked to Susannah like the world’s oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough
Drops. There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the
front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:
“Childe?” she asked. “Does that mean anything to you?”
He nodded. “It’s a term that describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. A formal
term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy,
chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven’t thought of
myself so in many years.”
“Yet you are Childe Roland?”
“Perhaps once I was. We’re beyond such things now. Beyond ka.”
“But still on the Path of the Beam.”
“Aye.” He traced the last line on the envelope:All debts are paid. “Open it, Susannah, for
I’d see what’s inside.”
She did.
Four
It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet’s name in