Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“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—”