Stephen King – The Dark Tower

entirely without emotions.”

Five

Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric

scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them

that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it…and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the

snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and

Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna

sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s

tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally

laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his

own food.

When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then

held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from

the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course

Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality

of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required

object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with

a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment

Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut

them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when

the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small

but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For

now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.

He didn’t draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of

the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of

the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.

Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then

held steady at his gentle touch. The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully.

Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.

The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.

“What do you see?” she asked him.

“What doyou see?” he asked in turn.

She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. “Well,” she said, “there’s Old Star and

Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there—oh my goodness!” She

placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a

bristly scruff) and turned it. “That wasn’t there back when we left from the Western Sea, I

know it wasn’t. That one’s inour world, Roland—we call it the Big Dipper!”

He nodded. “And once, according to the oldest books in my father’s library, it was in the

sky of our world, as well. Lydia’s Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again.” He

turned to her, smiling. “Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate

to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!”

Six

Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.

Seven

She’s in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes

are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not “Silent Night” or “What Child Is

This” but the Rice Song: “Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o,

Come-come-commala!” She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it

still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and

(no twins here)

she is comforted.

She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she

has gotten their hats. She hascombinedtheir hats.

Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path

leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It’s a door about six and a half feet high,

and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob’s of solid gold, and

filigreed with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils.

Eberhard-Faber #2’s, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.

Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It’s the perfect kindmit schlagon top, and a little

sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream. “Here,” he says, “I brought you hot chocolate.”

She ignores the outstretched cup. She’s fascinated by the door. “It’s like the ones along the beach, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Eddie says.

“No,” Jake says at the same time.

“You’ll figure it out,” they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.

She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland drew them wereTHE

PRISONERandTHE LADY OF SHADOWSandTHE PUSHER.Writ upon this one

is

. And below that:

THE ARTIST

She turns back to them and they are gone.

Central Park is gone.

She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.

On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words:“Time’s almost up…hurry…”

Eight

She woke in a kind of panic, thinkingI have to leave him…and best I do it before I can

s’much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon. But where do I go? And how can I leave him

to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?

This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost

certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on

more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the titlegunslinger, had he but a

gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though…Patrick was a…well, a

pencil-slinger. Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn’t kill much with an Eberhard-Faber

unless it wasvery sharp.

She’d sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the

watch, hadn’t noticed. And she didn’twant him to notice. That would lead to questions. She

lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She

remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she’d

decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whistling sound in the chilly air, the one

that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on the bottom of the plate,

the attachment that looked so much like Patrick’s pencil sharpener. She thought her mind

was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it

might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that?

There was at least one thing shedid know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The

meaning of the symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.

Time’s almost up. Hurry.

The next day her tears began.

Nine

There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry

her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and

open. Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first

thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was

solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then the great dark patch began to veer in a very

un-cloudlike way. She caught her breath and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.

“Roland!” she said. “Yonder’s a herd of buffalo, or maybe they’re bison! Sure as death n

taxes!”

“Aye, do you say so?” Roland asked, with only passing interest. “We called em bannock,

in the long ago. It’s a good-sized herd.”

Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the

pencil he was using, now holding the yellow barrel against his palm and shading with the

tip. She could almost smell the dust boiling up from the herd as he shaded it with his pencil.

Although it seemed to her that he’d taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten

miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own. That, she supposed,