The Dark Tower

“It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”

“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.

“No,” Roland said. “He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”

This raised a question in her mind. “We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she said. “How old do you think he is?”

Roland shook his head. “Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest to that.”

“Did Stephen King put him in our way?”

“I can’t say, only that he knew of him, sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?”

She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala! commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’s alone. But she had begun to hope that that didn’t necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her quest.

She had been having her own dreams.

TEN

Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combination truck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow’s operator) would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab’s roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. “‘California Sun’! The Rivieras! Oh, doesn’t it sound fine!”

“If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keep hold of thy plate.”

“You can count on that,” she said.

Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL. This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his head reading YARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn’t think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life.

ELEVEN

The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo’s hut, and although the engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the driver’s seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shiny-headed robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucas’s C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the snowfields:

“HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW? HOW ARE TRICKS IN KUH-KUH-KOKOMO?”

Roland stepped out of the late Lippy’s quarters. “Hile, Bill,” he said mildly. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn’t appear to be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head—twirling and twirling in the bright morning light—and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasy-Japaneezy, Eddie would have said.

“Ah!” said the robot. “A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g—” He raised an arm that had not one elbow-joint but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a little whistling noise—Wheeep!—and then he finished: “A gunslinger!”