Ten
Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn’t cut. Not
so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that
not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single
bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut.
The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking
from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation.
“ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSLINGER, FOR SUNSET’S
ALMOST NIGH!”
And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat,
enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb
to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn’t been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it.
And the rose sangYes, Roland, yes—you’ll have it again. You’ll be whole again. There
will be renewal. Only come.
Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put
them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and
Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark.
The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road.
When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland
supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not.
“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND
AND THY HEART?”
You’re a great one to speak of deviltry,Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped
back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o’clock to four,
four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.
“Patrick, hurry,” he said. “Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up.”
Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood.
The color of the Crimson King’s robe. And the exact color of his lunatic’s eyes.
Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to
Roland then: the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to
Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those
talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.
It’s still ka,the gunslinger thought.Even out here in End-W —
Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger’s right hand and peered
into it with the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed
there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture
upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting…hesitated…looked
at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon
about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper.
The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It
colored the Crimson King’s left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking
at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his
long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a
glimpse of Gan’s face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.
Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.
The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and—to Roland, at
least—immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain.
“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! STOP! IT BURNS!
BURRRRNS!EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEE! ”
“Now finish the other,” Roland said. “Quickly! For your life and mine!”
Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant
crimson eyes looked out of Patrick’s black-and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored
with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell’s own fire.
It was done.
Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. “Make him gone,” he said.
“Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last.”
Eleven
There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to
his drawing—to that curl of nostril-hair, as it happened—the Crimson King began to
scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And inunderstanding .
Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. “Aye, Patrick.
His time has come and you’re to be his executioner. Go on with it.”
The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease.
After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to
gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears.
The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but
the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until
the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut,
Woolworth’s during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred
the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and
showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs floating
three-quarters of the way up the page.
All the rest of him was gone.
Twelve
The shadow of the pyramid’s tip had come to touch the road; now the sky in the west
changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron of blood Roland had seen in
his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the call of the Tower doubled, then trebled.
Roland felt it reach out and grasp him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was
come.
Yet there was this boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the
end of End-World if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet Patrick had
come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally brought him to the Dark
Tower. Roland’s family was dead; his misbegotten son had been the last. Now would Eld
and Tower be joined.
First, though—or last—this.
“Patrick, listen to me,” he said, taking the boy’s shoulder with his whole left hand and his
mutilated right. “If you’d live to make all the pictures ka has stored away in your future,
ask me not a single question nor ask me to repeat a single thing.”
The boy looked at him, large-eyed and silent in the red and dying light. And the Song of
the Tower rose around them to a mighty shout that was nothing butcommala .
“Go back to the road. Pick up all the cans that are whole. That should be enough to feed
you. Go back the way we came. Never leave the road. You’ll do fine.”
Patrick nodded with perfect understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good.
Belief would protect him even more surely than a revolver, even one with the sandalwood
grips.
“Go back to the Federal. Go back to the robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings open on America-side. If it won’t open to your hand,draw it open with
thy pencil. Do’ee understand?”
Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood.
“If ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her Roland loves
her still, and with all his heart.” He drew Patrick to him and kissed the boy’s mouth. “Give
her that. Do’ee understand?”
Patrick nodded.
“All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing at the end of
the path when all worlds end.”
Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now,
and for him there would be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Eld’s line,
the path ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine.
He rose to his feet. The boy looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad.
Roland turned. He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.