Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Roland took the pad, however, and for a moment was so amazed by what he saw there that he looked away, as if even the eyes in Patrick’s drawing might have the power to fascinate him; might perhaps compel him to put his gun to his temple and blow out his aching brains. It was that good. The greedy and questioning face was long, the cheeks and forehead marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the foaming beard were full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” came that screaming, lunatic voice. “IT WON’T DO YOU ANY GOOD, WHATEVER IT IS! I HOLD THE TOWER—EEEEEEEE!—I’M LIKE THE DOG WITH THE GRAPES, ROLAND! IT’S MINE EVEN IF I CAN’T CLIMB IT! AND YOU’LL COME! EEEEE! SAY TRUE! BEFORE THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER REACHES YOUR PALTRY HIDING-PLACE, YOU’LL COME! EEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE!”

Patrick covered his ears, wincing. Now that he had finished drawing, he registered those terrible screams again.

That the picture was the greatest work of Patrick’s life Roland had absolutely no doubt. Challenged, the boy had done more than rise above himself; he had soared above himself and committed genius. The image of the Crimson King was haunting in its clarity. The far-seeing instrument can’t explain this, or not all of it, Roland thought. It’s as if he has a third eye, one that looks out from his imagination and sees everything. It’s that eye he looks through when he rolls the other two up. To own such an ability as this… and to express it with something as humble as a pencil! Ye gods!

He almost expected to see the pulse begin to beat in the hollows of the old man’s temples, where clocksprings of veins had been delineated with only a few gentle, feathered shadings. At the corner of the full and sensuous lips, the gunslinger could see the wink of a single sharp

(tusk)

tooth, and he thought the lips of the drawing might come to life and part as he looked, revealing a mouthful of fangs: one mere wink of white (which was only a bit of unmarked paper, after all) made the imagination see all the rest, and even to smell the reek of meat that would accompany each outflow of breath. Patrick had perfectly captured a tuft of hair curling from one of the King’s nostrils, and a tiny thread of scar that wove in and out of the King’s right eyebrow like a bit of string. It was a marvelous piece of work, better by far than the portrait the mute boy had done of Susannah. Surely if Patrick had been able to erase the sore from that one, then he could erase the Crimson King from this one, leaving nothing but the balcony railing before him and the closed door to the Tower’s barrel behind. Roland almost expected the Crimson King to breathe and move, and so surely it was done! Surely…

But it was not. It was not, and wanting would not make it so. Not even needing would make it so.

It’s his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form. They were dreadfully good, but they weren’t right. Roland felt a kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard enough to make his teeth chatter. They’re not quite r—

Patrick took hold of Roland’s elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes.

Yes. His eyes. I know that! But what’s wrong with them?

Patrick was still touching the corners of his eyes. Overhead, a flock of rusties flew through a sky that would soon be more purple than blue, squalling the harsh cries that had given them their name. It was toward the Dark Tower that they flew; Roland arose to follow them so they should not have what he could not.

Patrick grabbed him by his hide coat and pulled him back. The boy shook his head violently, and this time pointed toward the road.

“I SAW THAT, ROLAND!” came the cry. “YOU THINK THAT WHAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BIRDS IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, DO YOU NOT? EEEEEEEEE! AND IT’S TRUE, SURE! SURE AS SUGAR, SURE AS SALT, SURE AS RUBIES IN KING DANDO’S VAULT—EEEEEEEE, HA! I COULD HAVE HAD YOU JUST NOW, BUT WHY BOTHER? I THINK I’D RATHER SEE YOU COME, PISSING AND SHAKING AND UNABLE TO STOP YOURSELF!”

As I will, Roland thought. I won’t be able to help myself. I may be able to hold here another ten minutes, perhaps even another twenty, but in the end…

Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come.

Roland shook his head wearily. “Even if I could fight the pull of the thing—and I couldn’t, it’s all I can do to bide here—retreat would do us no good. Once we’re no longer in cover, he’ll use whatever else he has. He has something, I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren’t likely to stop it.”

Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Roland’s arm tightened until the boy’s fingernails bit into the gunslinger’s flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quick jabbing gestures with the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however.

Patrick was pointing at the roses.

“What about them?” Roland asked. “Patrick, what about them?”

This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture.

And this time Roland understood.

Nine

Patrick didn’t want to get them. When Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch.

“I’ll shoot anything he sends,” Roland said. “You’ve seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could pick it myself, I would. But there’s not. So it has to be you who picks the rose and me who gives you cover.”

But Patrick only cringed back against the ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was that he didn’t know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target.

And Patrick would not. Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the boy—possibly even one—he might have broken through his terror. But he didn’t have that time. Sunset had almost come.

Besides, it’s close. I can do it if I have to… and I must.

The weather had warmed enough so there was no need for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one of them and cut off the end, so his two remaining fingers would poke through. What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on, then rested on one knee with his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The next was fully six feet further away.

Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking his head frantically.

“I have to,” Roland said, and of course he did. This was his job, not Patrick’s, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown apart here at the edge of Can’-Ka No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would cease.

The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him again, trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Roland’s coat and twisted him off-true. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose. The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the rose’s song, filling his head and threatening to split his skull.

The stem never did break. In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane.

Close. Very close, that time.

The Crimson King screamed his frustration—

“EEEEEEEEEEE!”—and the cry was followed by multiple approaching whistles. Patrick pressed himself against the pyramid, face-first. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to make their turn. When they did, he took care of them: one and two and three.

“STILL HERE!” he cried at the old Red King. “STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER, MAY IT DO YA FINE!”

The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but sent no more sneetches.

“SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE!” he screamed. “LISTEN TO IT, ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALA-COME-COME!”

Now that song was all but imperative in Roland’s head. It burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped Patrick and turned him around. “Now,” he said. “For my life, Patrick. For the lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on.”

And child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory. Jake first hanging over darkness, then falling into it.

He stared into the mute boy’s terrified eyes. “Finish it! Show me that you can.”

Ten

Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn’t cut. Not so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation.

“ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSLINGER, FOR SUNSET’S ALMOST NIGH!”

And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn’t been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it.

And the rose sang Yes, Roland, yes—you’ll have it again. You’ll be whole again. There will be renewal. Only come.

Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not.

“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART?”

You’re a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o’clock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.

“Patrick, hurry,” he said. “Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up.”

Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson King’s robe. And the exact color of his lunatic’s eyes.

Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.

It’s still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in End-W—

Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger’s right hand and peered into it with the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting… hesitated… looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King’s left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gan’s face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.

Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.

The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and—to Roland, at least—immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain.

“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

EEEE! ”

“Now finish the other,” Roland said. “Quickly! For your life and mine!”

Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patrick’s black-and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell’s own fire.

It was done.

Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. “Make him gone,” he said. “Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last.”

Eleven

There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawing—to that curl of nostril-hair, as it happened—the Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And in understanding.

Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. “Aye, Patrick. His time has come and you’re to be his executioner. Go on with it.”

The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears.

The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth’s during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs floating three-quarters of the way up the page.

All the rest of him was gone.

Twelve

The shadow of the pyramid’s tip had come to touch the road; now the sky in the west changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron of blood Roland had seen in his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the call of the Tower doubled, then trebled. Roland felt it reach out and grasp him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was come.

Yet there was this boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the end of End-World if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet Patrick had come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally brought him to the Dark Tower. Roland’s family was dead; his misbegotten son had been the last. Now would Eld and Tower be joined.

First, though—or last—this.

“Patrick, listen to me,” he said, taking the boy’s shoulder with his whole left hand and his mutilated right. “If you’d live to make all the pictures ka has stored away in your future, ask me not a single question nor ask me to repeat a single thing.”

The boy looked at him, large-eyed and silent in the red and dying light. And the Song of the Tower rose around them to a mighty shout that was nothing but commala.

“Go back to the road. Pick up all the cans that are whole. That should be enough to feed you. Go back the way we came. Never leave the road. You’ll do fine.”

Patrick nodded with perfect understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good. Belief would protect him even more surely than a revolver, even one with the sandalwood grips.

“Go back to the Federal. Go back to the robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings open on America-side. If it won’t open to your hand, draw it open with thy pencil. Do’ee understand?”

Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood.

“If ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her Roland loves her still, and with all his heart.” He drew Patrick to him and kissed the boy’s mouth. “Give her that. Do’ee understand?”

Patrick nodded.

“All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing at the end of the path when all worlds end.”

Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now, and for him there would be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Eld’s line, the path ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine.

He rose to his feet. The boy looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad. Roland turned. He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.

“NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE GUN OF MY FATHER AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND!”

Patrick watched him stride to where the road ended, a black silhouette against that bloody burning sky. He watched as Roland walked among the roses, and sat shivering in the shadows as Roland began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and ka-mates; those names carried clear in that strange air, as if they would echo forever.

“I come in the name of Steven Deschain, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Gabrielle Deschain, she of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Cortland Andrus, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Cuthbert Allgood, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Alain Johns, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Jamie DeCurry, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Vannay the Wise, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of Hax the Cook, he of Gilead!

“I come in the name of David the hawk, he of Gilead and the sky!

“I come in the name of Susan Delgado, she of Mejis!

“I come in the name of Sheemie Ruiz, he of Mejis!

“I come in the name of Pere Callahan, he of Jerusalem’s Lot, and the roads!

“I come in the name of Ted Brautigan, he of America!

“I come in the name of Dinky Earnshaw, he of America!

“I come in the name of Aunt Talitha, she of River Crossing, and will lay her cross here, as I was bid!

“I come in the name of Stephen King, he of Maine!

“I come in the name of Oy, the brave, he of Mid-World!

“I come in the name of Eddie Dean, he of New York!

“I come in the name of Susannah Dean, she of New York!

“I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of New York, whom I call my own true son!

“I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as myself; you will open to me.”

After that came the sound of a horn. It simultaneously chilled Patrick’s blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into silence. Then, perhaps a minute later, came a great, echoing boom: the sound of a door swinging shut forever.

And after that came silence.

Thirteen

Patrick sat where he was at the base of the pyramid, shivering, until Old Star and Old Mother rose in the sky. The song of the roses and the Tower hadn’t ceased, but it had grown low and sleepy, little more than a murmur.

At last he went back to the road, gathered as many whole cans as he could (there was a surprising number of them, considering the force of the explosion that had demolished the cart), and found a deerskin sack that would hold them. He realized he had forgotten his pencil and went back to get it.

Beside the pencil, gleaming in the starlight, was Roland’s watch.

The boy took it with a small (and nervous) hoot of glee. He put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the road and slung his little sack of gunna over his shoulder.

I can tell you that he walked until nearly midnight, and that he looked at the watch before taking his rest. I can tell you that the watch had stopped completely. I can tell you that, come noon of the following day, he looked at it again and saw that it had begun to run in the correct direction once more, albeit very slowly. But of Patrick I can tell you no more, not whether he made it back to the Federal, not whether he found Stuttering Bill that was, not whether he eventually came once more to America-side. I can tell you none of these things, say sorry. Here the darkness hides him from my storyteller’s eye and he must go on alone.

EPILOGUE

SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK

No one takes alarm as the little electric cart slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until it’s wholly here in Central Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great pre-Christmas snowstorm come skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of ‘87, the newspapers will call it. Visitors to the park who aren’t watching the snowfall begin are watching the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the Harlem School Choir, sometimes called The Harlem Roses in the Post and its rival tabloid, the New York Sun. They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doo-wop harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves, turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the polar bears live their city lives, and the song they’re singing is “What Child Is This.”

One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well, and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left hand he’s holding a large paper cup and she’s sure it contains hot chocolate, the good kind mit schlag.

For a moment she’s unable to touch the controls of the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick have left her mind. All she can think of is Eddie—Eddie in front of her right here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not quite, what of that? If Co-Op City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things? It doesn’t matter. Only one thing would, and it’s that which keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him.

What if he doesn’t recognize her?

What if when he turns he sees nothing but a homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as a sat-on hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address (not in this where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because remembering is just too hurtful?

Worse still, what if he turns to her and she sees the burned-out, fucked-up, empty-eyed stare of the longtime junkie? What if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world white.

Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didn’t face Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordia just to turn tail and run now, did you? Surely you’ve got a moit more guts than that.

But she isn’t sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslinger’s voice speaks to her again, this time sounding wearily amused.

Perhaps there’s something you want to get rid of first, Susannah?

She looks down and sees Roland’s weapon stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandido’s pistola, or a pirate’s cutlass. She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand… how brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a lover. And she doesn’t have to, does she? The question is, what does she love more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one.

On impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their casings dull.

These’ll never fire, she thinks… and, without knowing why, or precisely what it means: These are wets.

She sights up the barrel and is queerly saddened—but not surprised—to find that the barrel lets through no light. It’s plugged. Has been for decades, from the look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made, after all. This gun is over.

Susannah, still holding the revolver with the sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little electric cart—the one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in her mind—rolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE! stenciled on the side. She tosses Roland’s revolver into this litter barrel. Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. It’s heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fast-food wrappers, advertising circulars, and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but she’s already become enough of the woman who’s waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the job is done.

Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns. He is indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!, but she barely registers that. It’s him: that’s what she registers. It’s Edward Cantor Dean. And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all she has feared. It’s total puzzlement. He doesn’t know her.

Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also he’s clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.

“Thank God,” he says. “I’d just about decided I’d have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That… well…” He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. “Listen, you are here for me, aren’t you? Please tell me I’m not making an utter ass of myself. Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

“You’re not,” she says. “Making an ass of yourself, I mean.” She’s remembering Jake’s story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he was alive. Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices.

“Thank God,” he says. “Your name is Susannah?”

“Yes,” she says. “My name is Susannah.”

Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least. She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good. Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those things because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it’s true. Her memories of

(Mid-World)

the gunslinger’s where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know it’s all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this.

But at the same time, it’s good.

It’s a damn miracle, is what it is.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

“No, I’m okay. Why?”

“You shivered.”

“It’s the sweetness of the cream.” Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-dusted foam.

“If you aren’t cold now, you will be,” he says. “WRKO says the temperature’s gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something.” From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red: MERRY CHRISTMAS.