The Dark Tower (96 page)

She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to look.”

“Where is this medicine cabinet?”

She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to Susannah like the world’s oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops. There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:

Childe Roland, of Gilead
Susannah Dear, of New York

You saved my life,
I’ve saved yours,
All delds are paid.
S.K.

“Childe?” she asked. “Does that mean anything to you?”

He nodded. “It’s a term that describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven’t thought of myself so in many years.”

“Yet you are Childe Roland?”

“Perhaps once I was. We’re beyond such things now. Beyond ka.”

“But still on the Path of the Beam.”

“Aye.” He traced the last line on the envelope:
All debts are paid.
“Open it, Susannah, for I’d see what’s inside.”

She did.

It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet’s name in his half-script, half-printing above the title. Susannah had read
some of Browning’s dramatic monologues in college, but she wasn’t familiar with this poem. She was, however,
extremely
familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic (a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. Someone—King, presumably—had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI.

“Read the marked ones,” he said hoarsely, “because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well.”

“Stanza the First,” she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture.

“My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.”

“Collins,” Roland said. “Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our ka-tet in his stories! ‘He lied in every word!’ Aye, so he did!”

“Not Collins,” she said. “Dandelo.”

Roland nodded. “Dandelo, say true. Go on.”

“Okay; Stanza the Second.

“What else should he be set for, with his staff?

What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare

All travellers who might find him posted there,

And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh

Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph

For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare.”

“Does thee remember his stick, and how he waved it?” Roland asked her.

Of course she did. And the thoroughfare had been snowy instead of dusty, but otherwise it was the same.
Otherwise it was a description of what had just happened to them
. The idea made her shiver.

“Was this poet of your time?” Roland asked. “Your when?”

She shook her head. “Not even of my country. He died at least sixty years before my when.”

“Yet he must have seen what just passed. A version of it, anyway.”

“Yes. And Stephen King knew the poem.” She had a sudden intuition, one that blazed too bright to be anything but the truth. She looked at Roland with wild, startled eyes. “It was this poem that got King going!
It was his inspiration!
”

“Do you say so, Susannah?”

“Yes!”

“Yet this Browning must have seen
us
.”

She didn’t know. It was too confusing. Like trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or being lost in a hall of mirrors. Her head was swimming.

“Read the next one marked, Susannah! Read ex-eye-eye-eye.”

“That’s Stanza Thirteen,” she said.

“As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair

In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud

Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.

One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,

Stood stupefied, however he came there;

Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!

“Now Stanza the Fourteenth I read thee.

“Alive? He might be dead for aught I know,

With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,

And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

I never saw a brute I hated so;

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”

“Lippy,” the gunslinger said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Yonder’s pluggit, colloped neck and all, only female instead of male.”

She made no reply—needed to make none. Of course it was Lippy: blind and bony, her neck rubbed right down to the raw pink in places.
Her an ugly old thing, I know,
the old man had said . . . the thing that had
looked
like an old man.
Ye old ki’-box and gammer-gurt, ye lost four-legged leper!
And here it was in black and white, a poem written long before sai King was even born, perhaps eighty or even a hundred years before:
. . . as scant as hair/In leprosy
.

“Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!” Roland said, smiling grimly. “And while she’ll never stud nor ever did, we’ll see she’s back with the devil before we leave!”

“No,” she said. “We won’t.” Her voice sounded drier than ever. She wanted a drink, but was now afraid to take anything flowing from the taps in
this vile place. In a little bit she would get some snow and melt it. Then she would have her drink, and not before.

“Why do you say so?”

“Because she’s gone. She went out into the storm when we got the best of her master.”

“How does thee know it?”

Susannah shook her head. “I just do.” She shuffled to the next page in the poem, which ran to over two hundred lines. “Stanza the Sixteenth.

“Not it! I fancied . . .”

She ceased.

“Susannah? Why do you—” Then his eyes fixed on the next word, which he could read even in English letters. “Go on,” he said. His voice was low, the words little more than a whisper.

“Are you positive?”

“Read, for I would hear.”

She cleared her throat. “Stanza the Sixteenth.

“Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face

Beneath its garniture of curly gold,

Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold

An arm in mine to fix me to the place,

That way he used. Alas, one night’s disgrace!

Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.”

“He writes of Mejis,” Roland said. His fists were clenched, although she doubted that he knew it. “He writes of how we fell out over Susan Delgado, for after that it was never the same between us. We mended our friendship as best we could, but no, it was never quite the same.”

“After the woman comes to the man or the man to the woman, I don’t think it ever is,” she said,
and handed him the photocopied sheets. “Take this. I’ve read all the ones he mentioned. If there’s stuff in the rest about coming to the Dark Tower—or not—puzzle it out by yourself. You can do it if you try hard enough, I reckon. As for me, I don’t want to know.”

Roland, it seemed, did. He shuffled through the pages, looking for the last one. The pages weren’t numbered, but he found the end easily enough by the white space beneath that stanza marked XXXIV. Before he could read, however, that thin cry came again. This time the wind was in a complete lull and there was no doubt about where it came from.

“That’s someone below us, in the basement,” Roland said.

“I know. And I think I know who it is.”

He nodded.

She was looking at him steadily. “It all fits, doesn’t it? It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and we’ve put in all but the last few pieces.”

The cry came again, thin and lost. The cry of someone who was next door to dead. They left the bathroom, drawing their guns. Susannah didn’t think they’d need them this time.

The bug that had made itself look like a jolly old joker named Joe Collins lay where it had lain, but Oy had backed off a step or two. Susannah didn’t blame him. Dandelo was beginning to stink, and little trickles of white stuff were beginning to ooze through its decaying carapace. Nevertheless, Roland bade the bumbler remain where he was, and keep watch.

The cry came again when they reached the kitchen, and it was louder, but at first they saw no way down to the cellar. Susannah moved slowly across the cracked and dirty linoleum, looking for a hidden trapdoor. She was about to tell Roland there was nothing when he said, “Here. Behind the cold-box.”

The refrigerator was no longer a top-of-the-line Amana with an icemaker in the door but a squat and dirty thing with the cooling machinery on top, in a drum-shaped casing. Her mother had had one like it when Susannah had been a little girl who answered to the name of Odetta, but her mother would have died before ever allowing her own to be even a tenth as dirty. A hundredth.

Roland moved it aside easily, for Dandelo, sly monster that he’d been, had put it on a little wheeled platform. She doubted that he got many visitors, not way out here in End-World, but he had been prepared to keep his secrets if someone
did
drop by. As she was sure
folken
did, every once and again. She imagined that few if any got any further along their way than the little hut on Odd Lane.

The stairs leading down were narrow and steep. Roland felt around inside the door and found a switch. It lit two bare bulbs, one halfway down the stairs and one below. As if in response to the light, the cry came again. It was full of pain and fear, but there were no words in it. The sound made her shiver.

“Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are!” Roland called.

No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and whooped, driving snow against the side of the house so hard that it sounded like sand.

“Come to where we can see you, or we’ll leave you where you are!” Roland called.

The inhabitant of the cellar didn’t come into the scant light but cried out again, a sound that was loaded with woe and terror and—Susannah feared it—madness.

He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. “Go first. I’ll back your play, if you have to make one.”

“’Ware the steps that you don’t take a tumble,” he said in the same low voice.

She nodded again and made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand:
Go on, go on.

That raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslinger’s lips. He went down the stairs with the barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for a moment he looked so like Jake Chambers that she could have wept.

The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks. Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind.

Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zig-zag aisle with crates stacked head-high on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS
and another stack with
HO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE CO
. stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their long-abandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise.

Ahead of her, Roland stopped. “Tears of my mother,” he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal’s living eyes out of their sockets.

She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.

In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar—the southeast corner, if she had her directions right—there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it . . . but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach—left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt—was a large and old-fashioned

(
dad-a-chum dad-a-chee
)

silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a
whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness.
We wish we did not know what we have become,
those eyes said,
but unfortunately we do
.