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."