2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

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 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

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.

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 Patrick.

Nor would their deaths be long in coming.

“I’m sure,” said she.

“All right. Will you give me a kiss?”

She took him by the arm and pulled him down and put her lips on his. When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death.

But not for you, gunslinger,she thought.For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may I do fine.

She was the one who broke their kiss.

“Can you open the door for me?” she asked.

Roland went to it, and took the knob in his hand, and the knob turned easily within his grip.

Cold air puffed out, strong enough to blow Patrick’s long hair back, and with it came a few

flakes of snow. She could see grass that was still green beneath light frost, and a path, and an iron fence. Voices were singing “What Child Is This,” just as in her dream.

It could be Central Park. Yes, itcould be; Central Park of some other world along the axis, perhaps, and not the one she came from, but close enough so that in time she would know no difference.

Or perhaps it was, as he said, a glammer.

Perhaps it was the todash darkness.

“It could be a trick,” he said, most certainly reading her mind.

“Lifeis a trick, love a glammer,” she replied. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path.”

“As you say so, let it be so,” he told her. He put out one leg, the rundown heel of his boot

planted in the earth, and bowed to her. Oy had begun to weep, but he sat firmly beside the gunslinger’s left boot. “Goodbye, my dear.”

“Goodbye, Roland.” Then she faced ahead, took in a deep breath, and twisted the little cart’s throttle. It rolled smoothly forward.