The Dark Tower

“Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on the way by.” And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.

This time the gunslinger’s smile was faint and distracted. “I don’t think it will be so easy,” he said.

Susannah sighed. “Actually I don’t, either.”

They had what they’d come for — quite a bit more, in fact — but they still found it hard to leave Sayre’s office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn’t want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre’s desk and roll it up. Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.

In the end, maybe it’s just another mind-trap, he thought. Like

Insomnia.

“We’ll leave it,” he said. “Soon enough — in months, maybe even weeks — we’ll have the real thing to look at.”

“Do you say so?” she asked faintly. “Roland, do you really say so?”

“I do.”

“All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn’t you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn’t that how a writer would want it?”

“That doesn’t mean he can do it,” Roland said. “Stephen King’s not the water, Susannah — he’s only the pipe the water runs through.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely believe it.”

Roland wasn’t completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the battle of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.

“I started lone-john, but that’s not how I’ll finish,” he said. She had been making her way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he plucked her out of it and settled her on his right hip, the one that no longer pained him. “You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the door, you’ll be with me when I climb the stairs, you’ll be with me when I deal with yon capering red goblin, and you’ll be with me when I enter the room at the top.”

Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her. In truth it felt like a lie to both of them.

Two

They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher’s knife, and a handy little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary kitchen.

“It’s Sterno,” she told the gunslinger when he inquired.

“Good stuff. You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue flame hot enough to cook on.”

“I thought we’d build a little fire behind the hotel,” he said. “I won’t need this smelly stuff to make one, certainly.” He said it with a touch of contempt.

“No, I suppose not. But it might come in handy.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but…” She shrugged.

Near the door to the street they passed what appeared to be a janitor’s closet filled with piles of rickrack. Susannah had had enough of the Dogan for one day and was anxious to be out, but Roland wanted to have a look. He ignored the mop buckets and brooms and cleaning supplies in favor of a jumble of cords and straps heaped in a corner. Susannah guessed from the boards on top of which they lay that this stuff had once been used to build temporary scaffoldings. She also had an idea what Roland wanted the strappage for, and her heart sank. It was like going all the way back to the beginning.

“Thought I was done with piggybackin,” she said crossly, and with more than a touch of Detta in her voice.

“It’s the only way, I think,” Roland said. “I’m just glad I’m whole enough again to carry your weight.”

“And that passage underneath’s the only way through? You’re sure of that?”

“I suppose there might be a way through the castle—” he began, but Susannah was already shaking her head.

“I’ve been up top with Mia, don’t forget. The drop into the Discordia on the far side’s at least five hundred feet. Probably more. There might have been stairs in the long-ago, but they’re gone now.”

“Then we’re for the passage,” he said, “and the passage is for us. Mayhap we’ll find something for you to ride in once we’re on the other side. In another town or village.”