"And how do you know that?"
He shook his head yet again, although he thought he knew the answer to her question. What he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say so.
"Lie down, Susannah," he said. "Take your rest. I'll watch until midnight, then wake you."
"So now we keep a watch," she said.
He nodded.
"Is he watching us?"
Roland wasn't sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for he'd have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of their companionship, as well.
Half-mother and White Father, with their backs turned to him.
"It's likely," he said.
She started to lie down, then stopped. She touched the sore beside her mouth. "This isn't a pimple, Roland."
"No?" He sat quiet, watching her.
"I had a friend in college who got one just like it," Susannah said. "It'd bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor-a special kind we call a dermatologist-and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its roots in a litde deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too."
Roland was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor. He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself. Mordred, as well.
"We don't have no novocaine, Baby-Boots," Detta Walker said, "and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell you, you goan whip out yo' knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off'n me. Goan do it faster than yon bum'blah c'n snatch a fly out de air. You unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?"
"Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest."
She lay over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened her eyes and gave him
(I watchin you, xuhite boy)
a glare. Roland nodded to her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes closed, they didn't open again.
He had promised to wake her at midnight, but let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch said was one O'The clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around him and his head in his arms.
And does his mouth, still caked with sai Thoughtful's blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but once, the milk it never tasted"?
Roland didn't know. Didn't particularly want to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly stone.
Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento's artificial sun and those he'd seen in Stephen King's world.
That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland's hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.
Chapter IV:HIDES
ONE
They had to go fireless three nights instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of Susannah's life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you 'd be lying from then on? Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?