The Dark Tower - Stephen King [312]
Six
The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks. Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind.
Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zig-zag aisle with crates stacked head-high on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled TEXAS INSTRUMENTS and another stack with HO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE CO. stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their long-abandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise.
Ahead of her, Roland stopped. “Tears of my mother,” he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animal’s living eyes out of their sockets.
She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands.
In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar—the southeast corner, if she had her directions right—there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it…but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach—left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt—was a large and old-fashioned
(dad-a-chum dad-a-chee)
silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do.
Something like that was in Patrick Danville’s eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!
Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danville’s hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long—it hung all the way to his shoulders—but there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.
“No offense, Patrick,” Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. “Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?”
The scrawny thing in the dirty jeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound