Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“Hush,” she told him. “Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we’ll take you out of

here and you’ll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo’s dinner

again.”

Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed

his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At

some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoner’s voice—or the words it articulated,

anyway—and had pulled it out.

Seven

Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick

Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boy’s gray shirt, but

Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts

in the hut’s only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins’s heavy parka hung on the hook in

the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of

Dandelo—Joe Collins that was—they had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them

unceremoniously out into the snow.

She said, “Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick,

there…Patrick was his cow. There’s two ways you can take nourishment from a cow: meat

or milk. The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts,

and then the stew, it’s gone. If you just take the milk, though, you can go on

forever…always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then.”

“How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?” Roland asked.

“I don’t know.” But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too

well. “A fairly long time, anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him.”

“And it hurt.”

“Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid’s tongue out, I bet

the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is.”

Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. “We can’t take him out in this storm.

Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I’m sure it would kill him.”

Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the

house.That might killher .

Roland agreed when she said so. “We’ll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes.

It’ll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back.”

“You’d kill them both?”

“Aye, if I could. Do’ee have a problem with that?”

She considered it, then shook her head.

“All right. Let’s put together what we’d take out there, for we’ll have no fire for the next

two days, at least. Maybe as long as four.”

Eight

It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and

blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and

Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself,

although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for

he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.

During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more about Patrick Danville than she

had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not

surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She

wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent

had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayre’s office.

Dandelo had given his captive the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and

had stolen emotions from him on a regular basis: two times a week, sometimes three, once

in awhile even four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him,

someone would happen by. Just lately, Patrick had been spared the worst of Dandelo’s

depredations, because “company” had been more frequent than ever before. Roland told

her later that night, after they’d bedded down in the hayloft, that he believed many of

Dandelo’s most recent victims must have been exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi

Russe or the town around it. Susannah could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such

refugees:The King is gone, so let’s get the hell out of here while the getting’s good. After

all, Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and he’s off his chump, round the

bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor.

On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then

had eaten the boy’s resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his

captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors: like

having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that.

Patrick couldn’t talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland

showed them a queer find he’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was

a stack of oversized drawing pads markedMICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL .

They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2

pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the

fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each

pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips

and a pencil-sharpener that looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining

Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes

lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.

Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, “Let’s see what he can do. I have a

pretty good idea already, don’t you?”

It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and

with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed

Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had

printedCHUNT! AndSPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick

drew a thought-balloon with the wordsTake that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed

Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted

with terrible accuracy (no need of theHa! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins

stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of

paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins

on his knees, with one hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front

of Patrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of

the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the

old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.

“What does it say?” Roland asked, fascinated.

“ ‘YUM! Good!’ ” Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.

Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The

speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the

amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy

either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that

made them—well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?—little acts of

genius. And the resulting pictures weren’t sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along

the path of the Beam—would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made

her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt?

It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.

Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down

to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this

young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even

existed.

Nine

Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep