Stephen King – The Dark Tower

As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his

tongueless mouth.

And did she see relief on Roland’s face? If so, she hated him for it.

“All right, Patrick,” she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even

reached over and patted his hand. “I understand how you feel. And while it’s true that

people can be cruel…cruel and mean…there’s plenty who are kind. Listen, thee: I’m not

going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open.”

He nodded quickly.Grateful I ain’t goan try no harder t’change his mine, Detta thought angrily.Ole white man probably grateful, too!

Shut up,Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.

Eighteen

But as the day brightened (revealing a medium-sized herd of grazing bannock not two

miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let Detta take over. It was easier

that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly

breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta

who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads

of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland

said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air…and

then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side.If we

was over there, Detta thought,we’d see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.

She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always

assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out

it wouldn’t. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and

mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the cart’s electric

motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the

green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed

door with the symbols meaningUNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with

the cart’s little bullet nose almost touching it.

She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed make-believe smile.

“All ri’, Roland—Ah’ll say g’bye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you

reach y’damn Tower, and—”

“No,” he said.

She looked at him,Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing.

Challenging him to turn this into something she didn’t want it to be. Challenging him to

turn her out now that she was in.C’mon, honky white boy, lessee you do it.

“What?” she asked. “What’s on yo’ mine, big boy?”

“I’d not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Only in Detta’s angry burlesque, it came outWhatchu mean?

“You know.”

She shook her head defiantly.Doan.

“For one thing,” he said, taking her trail-toughened left hand gently in his mutilated right

one, “there’s another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I’m not speaking of

Patrick.”

For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of

gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy.

“If Detta asks him, he’ll surely stay, for she’s never been to his liking. If Susannah asks

him…why, then I don’t know.”

Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back—Susannah understood now that she

would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer

wanted to be—but for now she was gone.

“Oy?” she said gently. “Will you come with me, honey? It may be we’ll find Jake again.

Maybe not quite the same, but still…”

Oy, who had been almost completely silent during their trek across the Badlands and the

White Lands of Empathica and the open rangelands, now spoke. “Ake?” he said. But he

spoke doubtfully, as one who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised

herself she wouldn’t cry, and Detta all butguaranteed she wouldn’t cry, but now Detta was

gone and the tears were here again.

“Jake,” she said. “You remember Jake, honeybunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie.”

“Ake? Ed?” With a little more certainty now. Hedid remember.

“Come with me,” she urged, and Oy started forward as if he would jump up in the cart

beside her. Then, with no idea at all why she should say it, she added: “There are other

worlds than these.”

Oy stopped as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again,

and she felt a moment of hope: perhaps there could still be some little ka-tet, a dan-tete-tet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each

other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shinnaro cameras.

Instead, Oy trotted back to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had

walked far, those boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking

was almost done.

“Olan,” said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice rolled a stone against her heart.

She turned bitterly to the old man with the big iron on his hip.

“There,” she said. “You have your own glammer, don’t you? Always did. You drew Eddie

on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?”

“No,” said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness

and such loneliness on a human face. “Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New

York. Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while with me?

That would make me happy.”

For a wild moment she thought she would. That she would simply turn the little electric

cart from the door—which was one-sided and made no promises—and go with him to the

Dark Tower. Another day would do it; they could camp at mid-afternoon and thus arrive

tomorrow at sunset, as he wanted.

Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The young man holding out the cup

of hot chocolate—the good kind,mit schlag.

“No,” she said softly. “I’ll take my chance and go.”

For a moment she thought he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his

anger—no, hisdespair —broke in a painful burst. “But you can’t besure! Susannah, what if

the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even when the door’s

open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll right through and into todash

space?”

“Then I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love.”

“And that might work,” said he, speaking in the bitterest voice she had ever heard. “For the

first ten years…or twenty…or even a hundred. And then? What about the rest of eternity?

Think of Oy! Do you think he’s forgotten Jake? Never! Never! Never in your life! Never in

his! He senses something wrong! Susannah, don’t. I beg you, don’t go. I’ll get on my knees,

if that will help.” And to her horror, he began to do exactly that.

“It won’t,” she said. “And if this is to be my last sight of you—my heart says it is—then

don’t let it be of you on your knees. You’re not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven,

never were, and I don’t want to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as

you were in Calla Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill.”

He got up and came to her. For a moment she thought he meant to restrain her by force,

and she was afraid. But he only put his hand on her arm for a moment, and then took it

away. “Let me ask you again, Susannah.Are you sure? ”

She conned her heart and saw that she was. She understood the risks, but yes—she was.

And why? Because Roland’s way was the way of the gun. Roland’s way was death for

those who rode or walked beside him. He had proved it over and over again, since the

earliest days of his quest—no, even before, since overhearing Hax the cook plotting

treachery and thus assuring his death by the rope. It was all for the good (for what he called

the White), she had no doubt of it, but Eddie still lay in his grave in one world and Jake in another. She had no doubt that much the same fate was waiting for Oy, and for poor