The Dark Tower - Stephen King [357]
“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART?”
You’re a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o’clock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.
“Patrick, hurry,” he said. “Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up.”
Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson King’s robe. And the exact color of his lunatic’s eyes.
Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.
It’s still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in End-W—
Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger’s right hand and peered into it with the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting…hesitated…looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King’s left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gan’s face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.
Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.
The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and—to Roland, at least—immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain.
“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEE!”
“Now finish the other,” Roland said. “Quickly! For your life and mine!”
Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patrick’s black-and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell’s own fire.
It was done.
Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. “Make him gone,” he said. “Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last.”
Eleven
There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawing—to that curl of nostril-hair, as it happened—the Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And in understanding.
Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. “Aye, Patrick. His time has come and you’re to be his executioner. Go on with it.”
The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears.
The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth