The Dark Tower

Patrick couldn’t talk, but he couldgesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer findhe’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack ofoversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had nocharcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencilsheld together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer wasthe fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off thetop of each pencil. These were stored in a ca

Roland looked at Susa

It turned out that he could do a lot. PatrickDanville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gavehim all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure;he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed JoeCollins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with ahatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the pointof impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in bigcomic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon withthe words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrickhimself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that wasdepicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawledabove his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips,watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on itand quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, withone hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front ofPatrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement(the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-stripthought-balloon over the old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamationpoints inside.

“What does it say?” Roland asked,fascinated.

“ ‘YUM! Good!’” Susa

Subject matter aside, she could havewatched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil waseerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputatederasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susa

Only once did his lack of interest in theerasers cross Susa

Nine

Near the end of the third night, Susa

“I think it’s likely the robot he calledStuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have oneof those ante

She remembered very well, and said so.

“It may be that he holds some specialallegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but itwouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of yourplates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”

“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to bea hundred per cent clear on this point.

“No,” Roland said. “He could give us aride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us tothe far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”

This raised a question in her mind. “Wecall him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she said. “How old do you thinkhe is?”

Roland shook his head. “Surely no youngerthan sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strangewhen the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I canattest to that.”

“Did Stephen King put him in our way?”

“I can’t say, only that he knew of him,sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?”

She did, and all the time. Sometimes it wasa pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroidstill hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer.Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photographstanding at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against atroubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the twoBeams that still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala!commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, orfor her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’salone. But she had begun to hope that that didn’t necessarily mean she wasgoing to die between here and the end of her quest.

She had been having her own dreams.

Ten

Less than an hour after the sun rose(firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combinationtruck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly butsteadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making thehigh bank even higher on that side. Susa

“If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keephold of thy plate.”

“You can count on that,” she said.

Patrick had joined them. As always sinceRoland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote asingle word in capital letters and held it out to Susa