The Dark Tower

On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then had eaten the boy’s resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors: like having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that.

Patrick couldn’t talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find he’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencil-sharpener that looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.

Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, “Let’s see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don’t you?”

It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, with one hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.

“What does it say?” Roland asked, fascinated.

“‘YUM! Good!’” Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.

Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made them—well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?—little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren’t sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam—would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.

Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.

NINE

Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.

“I think it’s likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?”

She remembered very well, and said so.