she is comforted.
She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her.
Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.
Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!
Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!
None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It's a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob's of solid gold, andfiligtved with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber#2's, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.
Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It's the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream.
"Here," he says, "I brought you hot chocolate."
She ignores the outstretched cup. She's fascinated by the door. "It's like the ones along the beach, isn't it?" she asks.
"Yes," Eddie says.
"No, "Jake says at the same time.
"You'llfigure it out," they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.
She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland dreiu them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER. Writ upon this one is ^j^s?\ 1 S ^. And below that:
"THE ARTIST
She turns back to them and they are gone.
Central Park is gone.
She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.
On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: "Time's almost up... hurry..."
EIGHT
She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him... and best I do it before I can s 'much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon.
But where do I go1? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?
This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though... Patrick was a... well, a pencil-slinger.
Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn't kill much with an Eberhard-
Faber unless it was very sharp.
She'd sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadn't noticed. And she didn't wanthxm to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she'd decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whisding sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on die bottom of die plate, the attachment diat looked so much like Patrick's pencil sharpener. She diought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that?
There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of die symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.
Time's almost up. Hurry...
The next day her tears began.
NINE
There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open.
Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then die great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breadi and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.
"Roland!" she said. "Yonder's a herd of buffalo, or maybe they're bison! Sure as death n taxes!"
"Aye, do you say so?" Roland asked, with only passing interest.
"We called em bannock, in the long ago. It's a good-sized herd."
Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding die yellow barrel against his palm and shading widi die tip. She could almost smell die dust boiling up from die herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Akhough it seemed to her that he'd taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own.
That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes.
"There hasn't been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years," she said.
"Aye?" Still only polite interest. "But they're in plenty here,