2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

She had none. They’d brought along enough bones and khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn’t last long. The bits of cloth would burn as rapidly as newspaper and the bones would be gone before the hands of Roland’s fancy new watch

(which he had shown her with something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And tomorrow night there would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the cans. She was aware that things could have been ever so much worse—she put the daytime temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and theydid have food—but she would have given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of longjohns.

“Probably we’ll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go along,” she said hopefully

once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind). “Weeds…bushes…more bones…maybe even deadwood.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not on this side of the Crimson King’s castle. Not even devilgrass, which grows damned near anywhere in Mid-World.”

“You don’t know that. Not for sure.” She couldn’t bear thinking about days and days of unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging than a spring day in Central Park.

“I think he murdered this land when he darkened Thunderclap,” Roland mused. “It probably wasn’t much of a shake to begin with, and it’s sterile now. But count your blessings.” He reached over and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside her full lower lip. “A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten your skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you died.”

“Cancer? Radiation?”

Roland shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter. “Somewhere beyond the Crimson King’s

castle we may come to grasslands and even forests again, but the grass will likely be buried under snow when we get there, for the season’s wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the day’s darkening so quickly.”

She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what came out was a sound of fear and

weariness so real that it frightened her. Oy pricked up his ears and looked around at them.

“Why don’t you cheer me up a little, Roland?”

“You need to know the truth,” he said. “We can get on as we are for a good long while, Susannah, but it isn’t going to be pleasant. We have food enough in yonder cart to keep us for a month or more, if we stretch it out…and we will. When we come again to land that’s alive, we’ll find animals even if thereis snow. And that’s what I want. Not because we’ll be hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we’ll need the hides. I hope we won’t need them desperately, that it won’t be that near a thing, but—”

“But you’re afraid it will.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it will. For over a long period of time there’s little in life so

disheartening as constant cold—not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I’m afraid we’re in for a very hard stretch. You’ll see.”

She did.

Five

There’s little in life that’s so disheartening as constant cold.

The days weren’t so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they sometimes came to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock and between the occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying blue sky like the red fingers of otherwise buried stone giants. The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her chapped hands up to shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go completely numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes

would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn’t that bad. It was just deep enough to make their lives

a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have sold her immortal soul during those unpleasant days and horrible nights? Sometimes she thought a single sweater would have purchased it; at other times she thoughtNo, honey, you got too much self-respect, even now. Would you be willing to spend an eternity in hell—or maybe in the todash darkness—for a single sweater? Surely not!

Well,maybe not. But if the devil tempting her were to throw in a pair of earmuffs—

And it would have taken so little, really, to make them comfortable. She thought of this constantly. They had the food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals along the path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands.

Badlands. She had hours and days and, ultimately, weeks to meditate on that word. What made lands bad? Poisoned water? The water out here wasn’t sweet, not by any means, but it wasn’t poisoned, either. Lack of food? They had food, although she guessed it might become a problem later on, if they didn’t find more. In the meantime she was getting

almighty tired of corned beef hash, not to mention raisins for breakfast and raisins if you wanted dessert. Yet it was food. Body-gasoline. What made the Badlands bad when you had food and water? Watching the sky turn first gold and then russet in the west; watching it turn purple and then starshot black in the east. She watched the days end with increasing dread: the thought of another endless night, the three of them huddled together while the wind whined and twined its way through the rocks and the stars glared down. Endless stretches of cold purgatory while your feet and fingers buzzed and you thoughtIf I only had

a sweater and a pair of gloves, I could be comfortable. That’s all it would take, just a sweater and a pair of gloves. Because it’s really not that cold.

Exactly how colddid it get after sundown? Never below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, she knew, because the water she put out for Oy never froze solid. She guessed that the temperature dropped to around forty in the hours between midnight and dawn; on a couple of nights it might have fallen into the thirties, because she saw tiny spicules of ice around the edge of the pot that served Oy as a dish.

She began to eye his fur coat. At first she told herself this was nothing but a speculative exercise, a way of passing the time—exactly how hot did the bumbler’s metabolism run,

and exactly how warm did that coat (that thick,luxuriantly thick, thatamazingly thick coat)

keep him? Little by little she recognized her feelings for what they were: jealousy that muttered in Detta’s voice.L’il buggah doan feel no pain after the sun go down, do he? No, not him! You reckon you could git two sets o’ mittens outta that hide?

She would thrust these thoughts away, miserable and horrified, wondering if there was any lower limit to the human spirit at its nasty, calculating, self-serving worst, not wanting to know.

Deeper and deeper that cold worked into them, day by day and night by night. It was like a splinter. They would sleep huddled together with Oy between them, then turn so the sides of them that had been facing the night were turned inward again. Real restorative sleep never lasted long, no matter how tired they were. When the moon began to wax, brightening the dark, they spent two weeks walking at night and sleeping in the daytime. That was a little better.

The only wildlife they saw were large black birds either flying against the southeastern horizon or gathered in a sort of convention atop the mesas. If the wind was right, Roland and Susannah could hear their shrill, gabby conversation.

“You think those things’d be any good to eat?” Susannah asked the gunslinger once. The moon was almost gone and they had reverted to traveling during the daytime so they could see any potential hazards (on several occasions deep crevasses had crossed the path, and once they came upon a sinkhole that appeared to be bottomless).

“What doyou think?” Roland asked her.

“Prob’ly not, but I wouldn’t mind tryin one and finding out.” She paused. “What do you reckon they live on?”

Roland only shook his head. Here the path wound through a fantastic petrified garden of

needle-sharp rock formations. Further off, a hundred or more black, crowlike birds either circled a flat-topped mesa or sat on its edge looking in Roland and Susannah’s direction,

like a beady-eyed panel of jurors.

“Maybe we ought to make a detour,” she said. “See if we can’t find out.”

“If we lost the path, we might not be able to find it again,” Roland said.

“That’s bullshit! Oy would—”

“Susannah, I don’t want to hear any more about it!” He spoke in a sharply angry tone she had never heard before. Angry, yes, she had heard Roland angry many times. But there was a pettiness in this, a sulkiness that worried her. And frightened her a little, as well.

They went on in silence for the next half an hour, Roland pulling Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and Susannah riding. Then the narrow path (Badlands Avenue, she’d come to call it) tilted

upward and she hopped down, catching up with him and then going along beside. For such forays she’d torn his Old Home Days tee-shirt in half and wore it wrapped around her

hands. It protected her from sharp stones, and also warmed her fingers, at least a little.

He glanced down at her, then back at the path ahead. His lower lip was stuck out a bit and

Susannah thought that surely he couldn’t know how absurdly willful that expression was—like a three-year-old who has been denied a trip to the beach. He couldn’t know and she wouldn’t tell him. Later, maybe, when they could look back on this nightmare and

laugh. When they could no longer remember what, exactly, was so terrible about a night when the temperature was forty-one degrees and you lay awake, shivering on the cold

ground, watching the occasional meteor scrape cold fire across the sky, thinkingJust a sweater, that’s all I need. Just a sweater and I’d go along as happy as a parakeet at feeding

time . And wondering if there was enough hide on Oy to make them each a pair of

underdrawers and if killing him might not actually be doing the poor little beastie a favor; he’d just been sosad since Jake passed into the clearing.

“Susannah,” Roland said. “I was sharp with you just now, and I cry your pardon.”

“There’s no need,” she said.

“I think there is. We’ve enough problems without making problems between us. Without making resentments between us.”

She was quiet. Looking up at him as he looked off into the southeast, at the circling birds.

“Those rooks,” he said.

She was quiet, waiting.

“In my childhood, we sometimes called them Gan’s Blackbirds. I told you and Eddie

about how my friend Cuthbert and I spread bread for the birds after the cook was hanged, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“They were birds exactly like those, named Castle Rooks by some. Never Royal Rooks,

though, for they were scavenger birds. You asked what yonder rooks live on. Could be they’re scavenging in the yards and streets ofhis castle, now that he’s departed.”

“Le Casse Roi Russe, or Roi Rouge, or whatever you call it.”

“Aye. I don’t say for sure, but…”

Roland didn’t finish and didn’t need to. After that she kept an eye on the birds, and yes,

they seemed to be both coming and going from the southeast. The birds might mean that they were making progress after all. It wasn’t much, but enough to buoy her spirits for the

rest of that day and deep into another shivering rotten-cold night.

Six

The following morning, as they were eating another cold breakfast in another fireless camp (Roland had promised that tonight they would use some of the Sterno and have food that was at least warm), Susannah asked if she could look at the watch he had been given by the Tet Corporation. Roland passed it over to her willingly enough. She looked long at the

three siguls cut into the cover, especially the Tower with its ascending spiral of windows.

Then she opened it and looked inside. Without looking up at Roland she said, “Tell me again what they said to you.”

“They were passing on what one of their good-minds told them. An especially talented one, by their accounts, although I don’t remember his name. According to him, the watch may stop when we near the Dark Tower, or even begin to run backward.”

“Hard to imagine a Patek Philippe running backward,” she said. “According to this, it’s eight-sixteen AM or PM back in New York. Here it looks about six-thirty AM, but I don’t guess that means much, one way or the other. How’re we supposed to know if this baby is running fast or slow?”

Roland had stopped storing goods in his gunna and was considering her question. “Do you see the tiny hand at the bottom? The one that runs all by himself?”

“The second-hand, yes.”

“Tell me when he’s straight up.”

She looked at the second-hand racing around in its own circle, and when it was in the noon position, she said, “Right now.”

Roland was hunkered down, a position he could accomplish easily now that the pain in his hip was gone. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his knees. Each breath he exhaled emerged in a thin mist. Susannah tried not to look at this; it was as if the hated cold

had actually grown strong enough to appear before them, still ghostlike but visible.

“Roland, what’re you d—”

He raised a hand to her, palm out, not opening his eyes, and she hushed.

The second-hand hurried around its circle, first dipping down, then rising until it was straight up again. And when it had arrived there—

Roland opened his eyes and said, “That’s a minute. Atrue minute, as I live beneath the Beam.”

Her mouth dropped open. “How in the name of heaven did you do that?”

Roland shook his head. He didn’t know. He only knew that Cort had told them they must always be able to keep time in their heads, because you couldn’t depend on watches, and a

sundial was no good on a cloudy day. Or at midnight, for that matter. One summer he had

sent them out into the Baby Forest west of the castle night after uncomfortable night (and it was scary out there, too, at least when one was on one’s own, although of course none of

them would ever have said so out loud, even to each other), until they could come back to

the yard behind the Great Hall at the very minute Cort had specified. It was strange how that clock-in-the-head thing worked. The thing was, at first it didn’t. And didn’t. And didn’t. Down would come Cort’s callused hand, down it would come a-clout, and Cort

would growlArrr, maggot, back to the woods tomorrow night! You must like it out there! But once that headclock started ticking, it always seemed to run true. For awhile Roland had lost it, just as the world had lost its points of the compass, but now it was back and that cheered him greatly.

“Did you count the minute?” she asked. “Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, like that?”

He shook his head. “I just know. When a minute’s up, or an hour.”

“Bol-she-vecky!” she scoffed. “You guessed!”

“If I’d guessed, would I have spoken after exactly one revolution of the hand?”

“You mought got lucky,” Detta said, and eyed him shrewdly with one eye mostly closed, an expression Roland detested. (But never said so; that would only cause Detta to goad him with it on those occasions when she peeked out.)

“Do you want to try it again?” he asked.

“No,” Susannah said, and sighed. “I take your word for it that your watch is keeping perfect time. And that means we’re not close to the Dark Tower. Not yet.”

“Perhaps not close enough to affect the watch, but closer than I’ve ever been,” Roland said

quietly. “Comparatively speaking, we’re now almost in its shadow. Believe me,

Susannah—I know.”

“But—”

From over their heads came a cawing that was both harsh and oddly muffled:Croo, croo! instead ofCaw, caw! Susannah looked up and saw one of the huge blackbirds—the sort Roland had called Castle Rooks—flying overhead low enough so that they could hear the labored strokes of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limp strand of something yellowy-green. To Susannah it looked like a piece of dead seaweed. Only notentirely dead.

She turned to Roland, looked at him with excited eyes.

He nodded. “Devilgrass. Probably bringing it back to feather his mate’s nest. Certainly not for the babies to eat. Notthat stuff. But devilgrass always goes last when you’re walking into the Nowhere Lands, and always shows up first when you’re walking back out of them, as we are. As we finally are. Now listen to me, Susannah, I’d have you listen, and I’d have

you push that tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would I have you waste my time by telling me she’s not there when I can see her dancing the commala in your eyes.”

Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, as if she would protest. Then she looked away

without saying anything. When she looked back at him again, she could no longer feel the presence of the one Roland had called “that tiresome bitch.” And Roland must no longer

have detected her presence, because he went on.

“I think it will soon look like we’re coming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to trust what you see—a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make for safety or civilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le Casse

Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he may have left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking to be done, I want you to let me do it.”

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked. “What are you holding back?”

“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him, a rare earnestness). “It’s only a feeling, Susannah. We’re close to our goal now, no matter what the watch may say. Close to winning our way to the Dark Tower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just

one rule with no exceptions:before victory comes temptation . And the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”

Susannah shivered and put her arms around herself. “All I want is to be warm,” she said. “If nobody offers me a big load of firewood and a flannel union suit to cry off the Tower, I guess we’ll be all right awhile longer.”

Roland remembered one of Cort’s most serious maxims—Never speak the worst

aloud!—but kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away carefully and then rose, ready to move on.

But Susannah paused a moment longer. “I’ve dreamed of the other one,” she said. There was no need for her to say of whom she was speaking. “Three nights in a row, scuttering along our backtrail. Do you think he’s really there?”

“Oh yes,” Roland said. “And I think he’s got an empty belly.”

“Hungry, Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said, for she had also heard these words in her dream.

Susannah shivered again.

Seven

The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. It widened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here stood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop it now. The next day they came to the first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped wreck

with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a flattened barn out back.

With Roland’s help Susannah turned the sign over, and they could make out one word:

LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come to know so well.

“I think the track we’ve been following was once a coach-road between Castle Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe,” he said. “It makes sense.”

They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads. It was the outskirts of a town or village—perhaps even a city that had once spread around the Crimson King’s castle. But

unlike Lud, there was very little of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in the remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard whispering voices

in the shadows. Roland identified these—with a matter-of-factness Susannah found eerie—as the voices of ghosts of what he called “housies,” and suggested they move back

out into the street.

“I don’t believe they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow,” Roland said, and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual manner.

Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which they had tried to camp had a chill that she thought was worse than physical cold. The things they had heard whispering in there might be old, but she thought they were still hungry. And so the three

of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, beside

Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a few degrees. They

tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.

“Why?” Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate.“Why?”

“Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?”

“No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?”

“It won’t burn because it hates us,” Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. “This ishis place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us. But…listen, Susannah. Now that we’re on an actual road, still more paved than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?”

“Sure,” she said. “Anything’s got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel.”

So that was what they did—the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after that.

She kept thinking,I’m gonna get sick, I can’t go on like this without coming down with something, but she didn’t. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left of her

lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.

Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needle-gardens of rock, but Susannah had

taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they could now read the occasional sign which proclaimed this to beTHE KING’S WAY (with

the eye, of course; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still on Badlands Avenue.

It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine what species of freakish people might once have lived here. The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folk seen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses, Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed together under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had collapsed, and there was an unpleasantlyorganic look to these ruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her from some configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in the rubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.

On their fourth night on The King’s Way, they came to a major intersection where the

main road made a crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the

Beam. Ahead, less than a night’s walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho Fat’s

Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it. In the chancy moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers bulged at the tops, as if wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways flew between them, crisscrossing above the courtyard in front of the castle proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She asked Roland about it.

“Water,” he said.

“What water? Do you have any idea?”

He shook his head. “But I’d not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying of thirst.”

“This place is bad,” she muttered, meaning not just the castle but the nameless village of leaning

(leering)

houses that had grown up all around it. “And Roland—it’s not empty.”

“Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy head—knocking or gnawing—then bid them away.”

“Will that work?”

“I’m not sure it will,” he admitted, “but I’ve heard that such things must be granted entry, and that they’re wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse.”

She had readDracula as well as heard Pere Callahan’s story of Jerusalem’s Lot, and understood what Roland meant all too well.

He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her away from the castle—which might not be naturally black after all, she had decided, but only tarnished by the years. Daylight would tell. For the present their way was lit by a cloud-scummed quarter-moon.

Several other roads led away from the place where they had stopped, most as crooked as broken fingers. The one Roland wanted her to look upon was straight, however, and Susannah realized it was the onlycompletely straight street she had seen since the deserted village began to grow silently up around their way. It was smoothly paved rather than cobbled and pointed southeast, along the Path of the Beam. Above it flowed the moon-gilded clouds like boats in a procession.