If we was over there, Detta thought, we'd see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.
She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out it wouldn't.
Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the cart's electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the cart's little bullet nose almost touching it.
She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed make-believe smile.
"All ri', Roland-Ah'll say g'bye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you reach y'damn Tower, and-"
"No," he said.
She looked at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing. Challenging him to turn this into something she didn't want it to be. Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. C'mon, honky white boy, lessee you do it.
"What?" she asked. "What's on yo' mine, big boy?"
"I'd not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time," he said.
"What do you mean?" Only in Detta's angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean?
"You know."
She shook her head defiantly. Doan.
"For one thing," he said, taking her trail-toughened left hand gendy in his mutilated right one, "there's another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I'm not speaking of Patrick."
For a moment she didn't understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy.
"If Detta asks him, he'll surely stay, for she's never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him... why, then I don't know."
Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back-Susannah understood now that she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer wanted to be-but for now she was gone.
"Oy?" she said gendy. "Will you come with me, honey? It may be we'll find Jake again. Maybe not quite the same, but still..."
Oy, who had been almost completely silent during their trek across the Badlands and the White Lands of Empathica and the open rangelands, now spoke. "Ake?" he said. But he spoke doubtfully, as one who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised herself she wouldn't cry, and Detta all but guaranteed she wouldn't cry, but now Detta was gone and the tears were here again.
"Jake," she said. 'You remember Jake, honeybunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie."
"Ake? Ed?" With a little more certainty now. He did remember.
"Come with me," she urged, and Oy started forward as if he would jump up in the cart beside her. Then, with no idea at all why she should say it, she added: "There are other worlds than these."
Oy stopped as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again, and she felt a moment of hope: perhaps there could still be some little ka-tet, a dan-tete-tet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shinnaro cameras.
Instead, Oy trotted back to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had walked far, those boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking was almost done.
"Olan," said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice rolled a stone against her heart. She turned bitterly to the old man with the big iron on his hip.
"There," she said. 'You have your own glammer, don't you?
Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?"
"No," said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such loneliness on a human face. "Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New York.
Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while with me? That would make me happy."
For a wild moment she thought she would. That she would simply turn the litde electric cart from the door-which was one-sided and made no promises-and go with him to the Dark Tower. Another day would do it; they could camp at midafternoon and thus arrive tomorrow at sunset, as he wanted.
Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The young man holding out the cup of hot chocolate-the good kind, mit schlag.
"No," she said softly. "I'll take my chance and go."
For a moment she thought he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his anger-no, his despair-broke in a painful burst. "But you can't be sure! Susannah, what if the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even when the door's open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll right through and into todash space?"