absorbed by this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately…then a little harder (the itch
intensified)…then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking. That itch was suddenly
everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin
clouds of gnats, it shivered at the very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard.
I’ll scream, I can’t help it, I have to scream—
She was drawing in her breath to do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain
was gone, as well. She reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated.
I don’t dare.
Youbetterdare! Detta responded indignantly.After all you been through—all webeen
through—you must have enough backbone left to touch yo’ own damn face,you yella
bitch !
She brought her fingers down to the skin. Thesmooth skin. The sore which had so troubled
her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when she looked in a mirror or a still pool
of water, she would not even see a scar.
Fifteen
Patrick worked a little longer—first with the eraser, then with the pencil, then with the
eraser again—but Susannah felt no itch and not even a faint tingle. It was as though, once
he had passed some critical point, the sensations just ceased. She wondered how old
Patrick had been when Dandelo snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young,
anyway. She was sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the
erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro.
Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle,she thought.Once you learn how, you never forget.
She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long minutes, her patience was
rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and showed her the picture. He had
erased the blemish completely and then faintly shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber.
“Very nice,” she said, but that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasn’t it?
So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth.
“Patrick, it’sbeautiful .”
The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first,
wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held
out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her
to take it. Wanting her to have it.
Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what
would happen if she tore it—toreher —right down the middle. She noted as she did that
there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore
beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the
time he’d known her, and he had drawn it in near-photographic detail. Now it was
gone—her exploring fingers told her so—yet Patrick wasn’t registering any emotion, at
least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When he’d erased it from his
drawing, he’d also erased it from his own mind and memory.
“Patrick?”
He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah wasvery happy. The
fact that she was also scared to death didn’t change that in the slightest.
“Will you draw something else for me?”
He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see:
?
She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the
eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly.
Susannah said: “I want you to draw me something that isn’t there.”
He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heart—Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure
what you meant.
“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”
And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah’s
voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire,
started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn’t
been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least
possible that Patrick’s magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the
gunslinger’s memory, too.
“Susannah, thy face! What’s happened to thy—”
“Hush, Roland, if you love me.”
The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak
again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of
understanding begin to enter his gaze.
Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was
bright under the stars.
Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the question-mark he had already drawn:
How tall?
Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger
stood about six-foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches
over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling.
“And look you at something that has to be on it,” she said, and took a branch from their
little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could
remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didn’t think about them overmuch. She
sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would
either open on some place she didn’t want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once
she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single
symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see
something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness.
Detta—brash, foul-mouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her
savior—might step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldn’t count on that. On her
heart’s deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully
trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself.
So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols
that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement:
“Unfound,” Roland breathed. “Susannah, what—how—”
“Hush,” she repeated.
Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw.
Sixteen
She kept looking around for the door, but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very
small even after Roland had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the
prairie, at least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken
question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the blemish had been. Holding
the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the eraser’s marks. Patrick had concealed
what few traces he’d left behind with great cunning, and Roland had found them only with
the closest scrutiny; it was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain.
“No wonder the old man cut off his erasers,” he said, giving the picture back to her.
“That’s what I thought.”
From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive leap: that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) un-create by erasing, he might be able to create by drawing. When she
mentioned the herd of bannock that had seemed mysteriously closer, Roland rubbed his
forehead like a man who has a nasty headache.
“I should have seen that. Should have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, I’m getting
old.”
She ignored that—she’d heard it before—and told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake,
being sure to mention the product-names on the sweatshirts, the choral voices, the offer of
hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her.
“Why didn’t you tell me this dream before now?” Roland asked. “Why didn’t you ask for
help in interpreting it?”
She looked at him steadily, thinking she had been right not to ask for his help. Yes—no
matter how much that might hurt him. “You’ve lost two. How eager would you have been