I should say. If a litde tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let's take a couple. I'd like to taste some fresh meat that isn't deer. Would you?"
She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man she'd believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she?
She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the everstrengthening beat-beat-beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself.
Beat-beat-beat.
Commala-come-come, journey's almost done.
That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight.
"I think he's out there someplace," she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. "Watch well."
"I will," he said. "And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast."
"You can count on it," said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasn't sure she'd be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep.
TEN
The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing "Come Go With Me," the old Del-Vikings hit), Jake (i DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT's A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesn't offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies.
That is the main difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps it's both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward.
A rather terrible question occurs to her: is she being purposely backward? Is there something here she doesn't want to confront? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is f**king up communications?
Surely that's a stupid idea-these people she sees are but figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by a bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a car-one slain in this world, one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done
(must be done, for there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet laureate.
Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic that seems to tell her You have it, Suze-you have what we want to show you, you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? It's the fourth quarter. It's the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your time-outs are gone. You have to hurry... hurry...
ELEVEN
She snapped awake with a gasp. It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet with sweat.
What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it you'd have me know?
To this question there was no answer. How could there be?
Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down. She lay that way for another hour, but couldn't get back to sleep.
TWELVE
Like Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like riding,
Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own.
They stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to her.
"What fashes thee, Susannah? I'd have you tell me. I'd have you tell me dan-dinh, even though there's no longer a tet and I'm your dinh no more." He smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears back no more.
Nor the trvith.
"If I'm still with you when we see your Tower, Roland, things have gone all wrong."
"How wrong?" he asked her.
She shook her head, beginning to weep harder. "There's supposed to be a door. It's the Unfound Door. But I don't know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my dreams and tell me I know-they tell me with their eyes-but I don't!
I swear I don't!"
He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasn't bleeding, but it had begun to grow again.
"Let be what will be," said the gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. "Let be what will be, and hush, and let ka Work."
"You said we'd outrun it."
He rocked her in his arms, rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. "I was wrong," he said. "As thee knows."