ONE
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King’s Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean’s fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre’s desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them.
These they destroyed, using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.
On Sayre’s wall were two framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy. He was shirtless, barefooted, tousle-haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a docker’s clutch. He looked about Jake’s age. This picture had a notquite-pleasant sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or both might have been part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard homosexuals called in the Village. The boy’s hair was black. His eyes were blue. His lips were red. There was a livid scar on his side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse lay dead before him. There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy’s marked left foot rested on the horse’s flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph.
“That’s Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse,” Roland said. “Its image was carried into battle on the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In- World.”
“So according to this picture, the Crimson King wins?” she asked. “Or if not him then Mordred, his son?”
Roland raised his eyebrows. “Thanks to John Farson, the Crimson King’s men won the In-World lands long ago,” he said.
But then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike his usual look that seeing it always made Susannah feel dizzy. “But I think wwon the only battle that matters. What’s shown in this picture is no more than someone’s wishful fairy-tale.” Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the frame with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way down the middle as he did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he certainly meant to do, she stopped him and pointed to the bottom. Written there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was the artist’s name: ^afoich ^Dwrnu/Ze.
The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray black cylinder tapering upward. It stood at the far end of Can’-Ka No Rey, the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had seemed taller than the tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire State Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors-each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard’s glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. “That is where my quest ends.” His voice was low and awestruck. “This picture wasn’t done from any dream, Susannah. It’s as if I could touch the texture of every brick. Do you agree?”
“Yes.” It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre’s wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
“The person who painted it must have been there,” Roland mused. “Must have set up his easel in the very roses.”
“Patrick Danville,” she said. “It’s the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?”
“I see it very well.”
“And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?”
“Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead-”
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
“Is that the Crimson King?” she asked, pointing. She didn’t quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.”
“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 batde of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
“I started lonejohn, 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 setded 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.”
Susannah was shaking her head again. “I think this is where civilization ends, Roland. And I think we better bundle up as much as we can,
