Stephen King – The Dark Tower

to lose me, as well?”

He flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. “Thee speaks ill of me, Susannah, and

have thought worse.”

“Perhaps I have,” she said. “If so, I say sorry. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted myself. Part

of me wants to see the Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if

Patrick can draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, it’s not the real world

it opens on. That’s what the names on the shirts mean, I’m sure of it.”

“You mustn’t think that,” Roland said. “Reality is seldom a thing of black and white, I

think, of is and isn’t, be and not be.”

Patrick made a hooting sound and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned

toward them so they could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the

Unfound Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasn’t printed on it, and the doorknob was

plain shiny metal—no crossed pencils adorned it—but that was all right. She hadn’t

bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and understanding.

They did everything but draw me a map,she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn

(riddle-de-dum)

mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory

answer…except it was the human condition, wasn’t it? The answers that mattered never

came easily.

Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an interrogative quality. She

suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically dying of anxiety, and why not? He had

just executed his first commission, and wanted to know what hispatrono d’arte thought of

it.

“It’s great, Patrick—terrific.”

“Yes,” Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to him exactly like those he’d

found as he staggered along the beach of the Western Sea, delirious and dying of the

lobstrosity’s poisoned bite. It was as if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his

head and seen an actual picture of that door—a fottergraff.

Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around desperately. And when she began to swing

along on her hands toward the edge of the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply,

reminding her that Mordred might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordred’s

friend.

Impatient as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well

what had happened to Mordred’s body-mother, and how quickly it had happened. Yet it

hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the coming day. If she was still with him, if

she saw it with him, she thought its power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer.

Now, given a choice between the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the

door. But as they drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper

and more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the door

would be harder to do.

“I don’t see it,” she said despairingly. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe thereis no damn door.

Oh, Roland—”

“I don’t think you were wrong,” Roland told her. He spoke with obvious reluctance, but as

a man will when he has a job to do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe this woman a debt,

he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her

into this world, where she’d learned the art of murder and fallen in love and been left

bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her into this present sorrow? If he could make that right,

he had an obligation to do so. His desire to keep her with him—and at the risk of her own

life—was pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training.

More important than that, it was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect

her. It broke what remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his

strange and wonderful ka-tet, but if it was what she wanted, what sheneeded, then he must

do it. And he thought hecould do it, for he had seen something about the young man’s

drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there; something that wasn’t.

“Look thee,” he said gently, showing her the picture. “Do you see how hard he’s tried to

please thee, Susannah?”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course I do, but—”

“It took him ten minutes to do this, I should judge, and most of his drawings, good as they

are, are the work of three or four at most, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t understand you!” She nearly screamed this.

Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the while looking at

Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes.

“He worked so hard to give you what you want that there’s only the Door. It stands by

itself, all alone on the paper. It has no…no…”

He searched for the right word. Vannay’s ghost whispered it dryly into his ear.

“It has no context!”

For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light of understanding

began to break in her eyes. Roland didn’t wait; he simply dropped his good left hand on

Patrick’s shoulder and told him to put the door behind Susannah’s little electric golf-cart,

which she had taken to calling Ho Fat III.

Patrick was happy to oblige. For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him

a reason to use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this time—almost carelessly, an

observer might have said—but the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and didn’t think

Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his

pencil down, and as he did, there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark,

streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more burned

straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the electric cart, was a door

Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis, in the Cave of the Voices.

Seventeen

Susannah waited until dawn, at first passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside again—what would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag

in which they were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would

probably laugh anyway…or scream and run at the very sight of her. The Susannah Dean

who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks not like a college

graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say

sorry. No, to civilized city people she’d probably look like some kind of freak-show

escapee. And once she went throughthis door, would there be any going back? Never.

Never in life.

So she put her gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white

light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go along with

her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she told him, although she

knew he didn’t remember that world at all—either he’d been taken from it too young, or

the trauma of being snatched away had erased his memory.

Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was squatted on his hunkers, looking at him.

“Either way, son,” the gunslinger said. “You can draw in either world, tell ya true.

Although where she’s going, there’ll be more to appreciate it.”

He wants him to stay,she thought, and was angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his

head a minute shake. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that meant—

And no, she didn’t just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was

hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while she’d known the gunslinger to lie

(most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the

coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie toher . To Detta, maybe, but not to

her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn’t told them all he knew, but

outright lie…? No. They’d been ka-tet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the

devil his due.

Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it

to them:

I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new.