The Dark Tower - Stephen King [318]
“Yes, sai,” Stuttering Bill said.
“Shit,” Susannah muttered. They had had similar problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis.
“H-H-However,” said Stuttering Bill, “if you were to c-c-couch your orders as suh-huh-hugestions, I’m sure I’d be huh-huh-huh-huh—” He raised his arm and smacked his head again. The Wheep! sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region of his chest, Susannah thought. “—happy to oblige,” he finished.
“My first suggestion is that you fix that fucking stutter,” Roland said, and then turned around, amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing great, blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was harmless; this time there was no one to steal Patrick’s joy. It belonged only to him. And to those lucky enough to hear it.
Thirteen
In the woods beyond the plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called “the Bads,” a shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, half-scraped hides watched the quartet standing in front of Dandelo’s hut. Die, he thought at them. Die, why don’t you all do me a favor and just die? But they didn’t die, and the cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives.
Later, after they had all piled into the cab of Bill’s plow and driven away, Mordred crept down to the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the cans in Dandelo’s pantry—and eating something else as well, something he would live to regret. He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big storm had come close to killing him. He believed it was his hate that had kept him alive, that and no more.
Or perhaps it was the Tower.
For he felt it, too—that pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick heard in a major key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he heard only one. It was the voice of his Red Father, telling him to come. Telling him to kill the mute boy, and the blackbird bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the uncaring White Daddy who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left him behind, but this never crossed Mordred’s mind.)
And when the killing was done, the whispering voice promised, they would destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity.
So Mordred ate, for Mordred was a-hungry. And Mordred slept, for Mordred was a-weary. And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelo’s warm clothes and set out along the freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich sack of gunna on a sled behind him—canned goods, mostly—he had become a young man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old, tall and straight and as fair as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar on his side where Susannah’s bullet had winged him, and the blood-mark on his heel. That heel, he had promised himself, would rest on Roland’s throat, and soon.
Chapter I:
The Sore and the Door
(Goodbye, My Dear)
One
In the final days of their long journey, after Bill—just Bill now, no longer Stuttering Bill—dropped them off at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean began to suffer frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and do her necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the cold ground, put her hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland knew this was happening—and surely he must have noted her red eyes when she returned to the road—he made no comment. She supposed he knew what she did.
Her time in Mid-World—and End-World—was almost at an end.
Two
Bill took them in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front reading
FEDERAL OUTPOST 19
TOWER WATCH
TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS FORBIDDEN!
She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the ground was little more than