“Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are!” Roland called.
No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and whooped, driving snow against the
side of the house so hard that it sounded like sand.
“Come to where we can see you, or we’ll leave you where you are!” Roland called.
The inhabitant of the cellar didn’t come into the scant light but cried out again, a sound
that was loaded with woe and terror and—Susannah feared it—madness.
He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. “Go first. I’ll back your play, if you
have to make one.”
“ ’Ware the steps that you don’t take a tumble,” he said in the same low voice.
She nodded again and made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand:Go on, go
on.
That raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslinger’s lips. He went down the stairs with the
barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for a moment he looked so
like Jake Chambers that she could have wept.
Six
The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks.
Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound
like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came
the whoop and gasp of the wind.
Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zig-zag aisle with crates stacked
head-high on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them,
looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising
the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeledTEXAS
INSTRUMENTS and another stack withHO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE CO .
stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their long-abandoned
taxi; she was far beyond surprise.
Ahead of her, Roland stopped. “Tears of my mother,” he said in a low voice. She had
heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into
a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking
up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal’s living eyes out of
their sockets.
She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up
to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.
In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar—the southeast corner, if she had her
directions right—there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel
bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it…but long ago,
judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook
pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach—left close by to mock him,
Susannah had no doubt—was a large and old-fashioned
(dad-a-chum dad-a-chee)
silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy
hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible
concentration-camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and
Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with
their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on
their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness.We wish we did not know
what we have become, those eyes said,but unfortunately we do .
Something like that was in Patrick Danville’s eyes as he held out his hands and made his
inarticulate pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some
jungle bird on a movie soundtrack:I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!
Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danville’s hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she
thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their
sockets. His hair was long—it hung all the way to his shoulders—but there was only the
faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip.
Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.
“No offense, Patrick,” Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the
lock. “Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?”
The scrawny thing in the dirty jeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees)
backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against
the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his
slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch
like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland
opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges),
Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder:I-YEEE!
I-YOWK! I-YEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the
cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against
the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful head-banging ceased, but
Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy,
long-fingered hands again, as if for succor.
Roland looked to Susannah.
She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing
in the corner uttered its weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back,
crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense.
“No, honey.” This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected.
“No, honey, Ah ain’ goan hurt you, if Ah meant t’do dat, Ah’d just put two in yo’ haid, like
Ah did that mahfah upstairs.”
She saw something in his eyes—perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the
bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. “Dass ri’! Mistuh Collins, hedaid! He ain’ nev’
goan come down he’ no mo an…whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick?”
Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house
creaked and groaned in protest.
“Whuh he do t’you, boy?”
It was no good. He didn’t understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick
Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she
realized was supposed to indicate laughter.
“He make you laugh?”
Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands
became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into
his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his
nose.
“He make you cry, too.”
Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going ho-ho-ho;
he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and makingsmack-smack sounds with his
lips.
From above and slightly behind her, Roland said: “He made you laugh, he made you cry,
he made you eat.”
Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner.
“Heate,” Detta said. “Dass whut you trine t’say, ain’t it?Dandelo ate.”
Patrick nodded eagerly.
“He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he
do!”
Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah
worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if
the head-banging started again. It didn’t. When she reached the boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept. Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her
eyes that he could come in now.
When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration.
“Don’t you worry,” Susannah said—Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all
that nice. “He’s not going to get you, Patrick, he’s dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth.”
Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she
hated to see even more. It was shame.
“Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth.”
He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head
of a mop.
Roland said, “What—”