The Dark Tower

A faint smile touched his lips. “It’s better when it’s the two of us, isn’t it?”

She sighed, then nodded. “A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let’s blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses.”

Five

He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs, Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap. At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the bottom.

“That’s the end of that,” she said when the echoes had finally ceased. “You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it’s going to do me now.”

“We’ll see,” Roland said, starting down. “You might be surprised.”

“That thing ain’t gonna work fo’ shit an we bofe know it,” Detta said. Oy uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That’s right.

Six

The chair did

survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they’d come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.

“There, now, dint I tell you?” she asked, and cackled. “Reckon it’s time to start totin dat barge, Roland!”

He eyed her. “Can you make Detta go away?”

She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said. She flushed. “Yes,” she said in a remarkably small voice. “Say sorry, Roland.”

He picked her up and got her settled into the harness. Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan — as creepy as it was beneath the Dogan — Susannah was glad that they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn’t think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower.

The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her way to Roland’s obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn’t todash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag.

Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?

Seven

They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.

Under the main message they had signed their names: Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted’s, and reading them made her feel like crying:

“God love em,” Susannah said hoarsely. “May God love and keep em all.”

“Keep-um,” said a small and rather timid voice from Roland’s heel. They looked down.

“Decided to talk again, sugarpie?” Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.

Eight