Song of Susannah

obliterated by the fall of the Dark Tower?

He looked at Roland and sent a thought, as clearly as he could: Roland, help us.

And one came back, filling his mind with cold comfort (ah, but comfort served cold was better than no comfort at all): If I can.

“Watch Me,” said Rosalita, and laid down her cards. She had built Wands, the high run, and the card on top was Madame Death.

STAVE: Commala-come-come
There’s a young man with a gun.
Young man lost his honey
When she took it on the run.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-one !
She took it on the run!
Left her baby lonely but
Her baby ain’t done.

2nd STANZA The Persistence of Magic

ONE

They needn’t have worried about the Manni-folk showing up. Henchick, dour as ever, appeared at the town common, which had been the designated setting-out point, with forty men. He assured Roland it would be enough to open the Unfound Door, if it could indeed be opened now that what he called “the dark glass” was gone. The old man offered no word of apology for showing up with less than the promised number of men, but he kept tugging on his beard. Sometimes with both hands.

“Why does he do that, Pere, do you know?” Jake asked Callahan. Henchick’s troops were rolling eastward in a dozen bucka waggons. Behind these, drawn by a pair of albino asses with freakishly long ears and fiery pink eyes, was a two-wheeled fly completely covered in white duck. To Jake it looked like a big Jiffy-Pop container on wheels. Henchick rode upon this contraption alone, gloomily yanking at his chin-whiskers.

“I think it means he’s embarrassed,” Callahan said.

“I don’t see why. I’m surprised so many showed up, after the Beamquake and all.”

“What he learned when the ground shook is mat some of his men were more afraid of that than of him. As far as Henchick’s concerned, it adds up to an unkept promise. Not just any unkept promise, either, but one he made to your dinh. He’s lost face.” And, without changing his tone of voice at all, tricking him into an answer he would not otherwise have given, Callahan asked: “Is she still alive, then, your molly?”

“Yes, but in ter-” Jake began, then covered his mouth. He looked at Callahan accusingly. Ahead of them, on the seat of the two-wheeled fly, Henchick looked around, startled, as if they had raised their voices in argument. Callahan wondered if everyone in this damned story had the touch but him.

It’s not a story. It’s not a story, it’s my life!

But it was hard to believe that, wasn’t it, when you’d seen yourself set in type as a major character in a book with the word fiction on the copyright page. Doubleday and Company, 1975. A book about vampires, yet, which everyone knew weren’t real. Except they had been. And, in at least some of the worlds adjacent to this one, still were.

“Don’t treat me like that,” Jake said. “Don’t trick me like that. Not if we’re all on the same side, Pere. Okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Callahan said. And then: “Cry pardon.”

Jake smiled wanly and stroked Oy, who was riding in the front pocket of his poncho.

“Is she-”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about her now, Pere. It’s best we not even think about her. 1 have a feeling-I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s strong-that something’s looking for her. If there is, it’s better it not overhear us. And it could.”

“Something…?”

Jake reached out and touched the kerchief Callahan wore around his neck, cowboy-style. It was red. Then he put a hand briefly over his left eye. For a moment Callahan didn’t understand, and then he did. The red eye. The Eye of the King.

He sat back on the seat of the waggon and said no more. Behind them, not talking, Roland and Eddie rode horseback, side by side. Both were carrying their gunna as well as their guns, and Jake had his own in the waggon behind him. If they came back to Calla Bryn Sturgis after today, it wouldn’t be for long.

Interror was what he had started to say, but it was worse than that. Impossibly faint, impossibly distant, but still clear, Jake could hear Susannah screaming. He only hoped Eddie did not.

TWO

So they rode away from a town that mostly slept in emotional exhaustion despite the quake which had struck it. The day was cool enough so that when they started out they could see their breath on the air, and a light scrim of frost coated the dead cornstalks. A mist hung over the Devar-tete Whye like the river’s own spent breath. Roland thought: This is the edge of winter.

An hour’s ride brought them to the arroyo country. There was no sound but the jingle of trace, the squeak of wheels, the clop of horses, an occasional sardonic honk from one of the albino asses pulling the fly, and distant, the call of rusties on the wing. Headed south, perhaps, if they could still find it.

Ten or fifteen minutes after the land began to rise on their right, filling in with bluffs and cliffs and mesas, they returned to the place where, just twenty-four hours before, they had come with the children of the Calla and fought their battle. Here a track split off from the East Road and rambled more or less northwest. In the ditch on the other side of the road was a raw trench of earth. It was the hide where Roland, his ka-tet, and the ladies of the dish had waited for the Wolves.

And, speaking of the Wolves, where were they? When they’d left this place of ambush, it had been littered with bodies. Over sixty, all told, man-shaped creatures who had come riding out of the west wearing gray pants, green cloaks, and snarling wolf-masks.

Roland dismounted and walked up beside Henchick, who was getting down from the two-wheeled fly with the stiff awkwardness of age. Roland made no effort to help him. Henchick wouldn’t expect it, might even be offended by it.

The gunslinger let him give his dark cloak a final settling shake, started to ask his question, and then realized he didn’t have to. Forty or fifty yards farther along, on the right side of the road, was a vast hill of uprooted corn-plants where no hill had been the day before. It was a funerary heap, Roland saw, one which had been constructed without any degree of respect. He hadn’t lost any time or wasted any effort wondering how the folken had spent the previous afternoon-before beginning the party they were now undoubtedly sleeping off-but now he saw their work before him. Had they been afraid the Wolves might come back to life? he wondered, and knew that, on some level, that was exactly what they’d feared. And so they’d dragged the heavy, inert bodies (gray horses as well as gray-clad Wolves) off into the corn, stacked them willy-rully, then covered them with uprooted corn-plants. Today they’d turn this bier into a pyre. And if the seminon winds came? Roland guessed they’d light it up anyway, and chance a possible conflagration in the fertile land between road and river. Why not? The growing season was over for the year, and there was nothing like fire for fertilizer, so the old folks did say; besides, the folken would not really rest easy until that hill was burned. And even then few of them would like to come out here.

“Roland, look,” Eddie said in a voice that trembled somewhere between sorrow and rage. “Ah, goddammit, look.”

Near the end of the path, where Jake, Benny Slightman, and the Tavery twins had waited before making their final dash for safety across the road, stood a scratched and battered wheelchair, its chrome winking brilliantly in the sun, its seat streaked with dust and blood. The left wheel was bent severely out of true.

“Why do’ee speak in anger?” Henchick inquired. He had been joined by Cantab and half a dozen elders of what Eddie sometimes referred to as the Cloak Folk. Two of these elders looked a good deal older than Henchick himself, and Roland thought of what Rosalita had said last night: Many of them nigh as old as Henchick, trying to climb that path after dark. Well, it wasn’t dark, but he didn’t know if some of these would be able to walk as far as the upsy part of the path to Doorway Cave, let alone the rest of the way to the top.

“They brought your woman’s rolling chair back here to honor her. And you. So why do’ee speak in anger?”

“Because it’s not supposed to be all banged up, and she’s supposed to be in it,” Eddie told the old man. “Do you ken that, Henchick?”

“Anger is the most useless emotion,” Henchick intoned, “destructive to the mind and hurtful of the heart.”

Eddie’s lips thinned to no more than a white scar below his nose, but he managed to hold in a retort. He walked over to Susannah’s scarred chair-it had rolled hundreds of miles since they’d found it in Topeka, but its rolling days were done-and looked down at it moodily. When Callahan approached him, Eddie waved the Pere back.

Jake was looking at the place on the road where Benny had been struck and killed. The boy’s body was gone, of course, and someone had covered his spilled blood with a fresh layer of the oggan, but Jake found he could see the dark splotches, anyway. And Benny’s severed arm, lying palm-up. Jake remembered how his friend’s Da’ had staggered out of the corn and seen his son lying there.