“Shit,” Susannah muttered. They had had similar problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn
Sturgis.
“H-H-However,” said Stuttering Bill, “if you were to c-c-couch your orders as
suh-huh-hugestions, I’m sure I’d be huh-huh-huh-huh—” He raised his arm and smacked
his head again. TheWheep! sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region
of his chest, Susannah thought. “—happy to oblige,” he finished.
“My first suggestion is that you fix that fucking stutter,” Roland said, and then turned
around, amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing great,
blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was harmless; this time
there was no one to steal Patrick’s joy. It belonged only to him. And to those lucky enough
to hear it.
Thirteen
In the woods beyond the plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called
“the Bads,” a shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, half-scraped hides watched the
quartet standing in front of Dandelo’s hut.Die, he thought at them.Die, why don’t you all
do me a favor and just die? But they didn’t die, and the cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives.
Later, after they had all piled into the cab of Bill’s plow and driven away, Mordred crept
down to the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the cans in
Dandelo’s pantry—and eating something else as well, something he would live to regret.
He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big stormhad come close to killing him.
He believed it was his hate that had kept him alive, that and no more.
Or perhaps it was the Tower.
For he felt it, too—that pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick
heard in a major key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he
heard only one. It was the voice of his Red Father, telling him to come. Telling him to kill
the mute boy, and the blackbird bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the
uncaring White Daddy who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left
him behind, but this never crossed Mordred’s mind.)
And when the killing was done, the whispering voice promised, they would destroy the
Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity.
So Mordred ate, for Mordred was a-hungry. And Mordred slept, for Mordred was a-weary.
And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelo’s warm clothes and set out along the
freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich sack of gunna on a sled behind him—canned
goods, mostly—he had become a young man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old,
tall and straight and as fair as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar
on his side where Susannah’s bullet had winged him, and the blood-mark on his heel. That
heel, he had promised himself, would rest on Roland’s throat, and soon.
Chapter I:
The Sore and the Door
(Goodbye, My Dear)
One
In the final days of their long journey, after Bill—just Bill now, no longer Stuttering
Bill—dropped them off at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean
began to suffer frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and
would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and do her
necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the cold ground, put her
hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland knew this was happening—and surely
he must have noted her red eyes when she returned to the road—he made no comment. She
supposed he knew what she did.
Her time in Mid-World—and End-World—was almost at an end.
Two
Bill took them in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front
reading
FEDERALOUTPOST19
TOWERWATCH
TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS FORBIDDEN!
She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica,
but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the
ground was little more than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah
thought the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American
Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weather—perhaps
even pokeberries—but now they were bare and clattering in the nearly constant wind.
Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Road—which had once been paved but had
now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken ruts—were tall grasses poking out of
the thin snow-cover. They whispered in the wind and Susannah knew their
song:Commala-come-come, journey’s almost done.
“I may go no further,” Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off Little Richard in
mid-rave. “Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o’ the Borderlands.”
Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and during that time he had
entertained them with a constant stream of what he called “golden oldies.” Some of these
were not old at all to Susannah; songs like “Sugar Shack” and “Heat Wave” had been
current hits on the radio when she’d returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful
silver discs Bill called “ceedees.” He pushed them into a slot in the plow’s
instrument-cluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight different speakers.
Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed, but she was especially taken by
two songs she had never heard before. One was a deliriously happy little rocker called “She Loves You.” The other, sad and reflective, was called “Hey Jude.” Roland actually seemed
to know the latter one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different
from the ones coming out of the plow’s multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her
the group was called The Beetles.
“Funny name for a rock-and-roll band,” Susannah said.
Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plow’s tiny rear seat, tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was currently working his way. Beneath a picture
of Roland in profile, he had printed:BEATLES, not Beetles .
“It’s a funny name for a rock-and-roll band no matter which way you spell it,” Susannah
said, and that gave her an idea. “Patrick, do you have the touch?” When he frowned and
raised his hands—I don’t understand,the gesture said—she rephrased the question. “Can
you read my mind?”
He shrugged and smiled. This gesture saidI don’t know, but she thought Patrick did know.
She thought he knew very well.
Three
They reached “the Federal” near noon, and there Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick
wolfed his and then sat off to one side with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as
they sat around the table in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room
were covered with TV screens—Susannah guessed there were three hundred or more. They
must have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed the
rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and one showed a
series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach if she looked at it too long.
The snow-screens, Bill said, had once shown pictures from satellites in orbit around the
Earth, but the cameras in those had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was
more interesting. Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the
Dark Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing but those lines.
“I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill told them. “Especially if he
knew company might be coming. Won’t you have another sandwich? There are plenty, I
assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you, Patrick? You’re too thin, you know—far,far
too thin.”
Patrick turned his pad around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of
Susannah, a tray of neatly cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the
other. Like all of Patrick’s pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been produced
with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland smiled and nodded.
Patrick grinned, holding his teeth together so that the others wouldn’t have to look at the
empty hole behind them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new.
“There’s a fleet of vehicles out back,” Bill said, “and while many of them no longer run, some still do. I can give you a truck with four-wheel drive, and while I cannot assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as far as the Dark Tower, which