The Dark Tower

“I think it will soon look like we’re coming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to trust what you see—a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make for safety or civilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le Casse Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he may have left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking to be done, I want you to let me do it.”

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked. “What are you holding back?”

“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him, a rare earnestness). “It’s only a feeling, Susannah. We’re close to our goal now, no matter what the watch may say. Close to winning our way to the Dark Tower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just one rule with no exceptions: before victory comes temptation. And the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”

Susannah shivered and put her arms around herself. “All I want is to be warm,” she said. “If nobody offers me a big load of firewood and a flannel union suit to cry off the Tower, I guess we’ll be all right awhile longer.”

Roland remembered one of Cort’s most serious maxims—Never speak the worst aloud!—but kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away carefully and then rose, ready to move on.

But Susannah paused a moment longer. “I’ve dreamed of the other one,” she said. There was no need for her to say of whom she was speaking. “Three nights in a row, scuttering along our backtrail. Do you think he’s really there?”

“Oh yes,” Roland said. “And I think he’s got an empty belly.”

“Hungry, Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said, for she had also heard these words in her dream.

Susannah shivered again.

SEVEN

The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. It widened further still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here stood a rusty rod that had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop it now. The next day they came to the first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped wreck with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a flattened barn out back. With Roland’s help Susannah turned the sign over, and they could make out one word: LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come to know so well.

“I think the track we’ve been following was once a coach-road between Castle Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe,” he said. “It makes sense.”

They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads. It was the outskirts of a town or village—perhaps even a city that had once spread around the Crimson King’s castle. But unlike Lud, there was very little of it left. Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps around the remains of some of the buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped down harder than ever. On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in the remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard whispering voices in the shadows. Roland identified these—with a matter-of-factness Susannah found eerie—as the voices of ghosts of what he called “housies,” and suggested they move back out into the street.

“I don’t believe they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow,” Roland said, and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his usual manner.

Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which they had tried to camp had a chill that she thought was worse than physical cold. The things they had heard whispering in there might be old, but she thought they were still hungry. And so the three of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands Avenue, beside Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the temperature a few degrees. They tried making a fire from the boards of one of the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.

“Why?” Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate. “Why?”

“Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?”

“No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?”

“It won’t burn because it hates us,” Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. “This is his place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us. But . . . listen, Susannah. Now that we’re on an actual road, still more paved than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?”

“Sure,” she said. “Anything’s got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel.”