The Dark Tower VII Read online

  Susannah almost started forward. Hungry as she was for fresh food (for fresh meat), it was the sweaters and the thermal underwear that she really craved. Although supplies were getting thin (and would surely run out before they were past the place the uffi called Empathica), there were still cans of beans and tuna and corned beef hash rolling around in the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and their bellies were currently full. It was the cold that was killing her. That was what it felt like, at least; cold working its way inward toward her heart, one painful inch at a time.

  Two things stopped her. One was the realization that a single step forward was all it would take to destroy what little remained of her will; she’d run to the center of the bridge and fall on her knees before that deep basket of clothes and go grubbing through it like a predatory housewife at the annual Filene’s white-sale. Once she took that first step, nothing would stop her. And losing her will wouldn’t be the worst of it; she would also lose the self-respect Odetta Holmes had labored all her life to win, despite the barely suspected saboteur lurking in her mind.

  Yet even that wouldn’t have been enough to hold her back. What did was a memory of the day they’d seen the crow with the green stuff in its beak, the crow that had been going Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw! Only devilgrass, true, but green stuff, all the same. Living stuff. That was the day Roland had told her to hold her tongue, had told her—what was it? Before victory comes temptation. She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest temptation would be a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, but—

  She suddenly understood what the gunslinger must have known, if not from the first then from soon after the three Stephen Kings appeared: this whole thing was a shuck. She didn’t know what, exactly, was in those wicker baskets, but she doubted like hell that it was food and clothes.

  She settled within herself.

  “Well?” Fimalo asked patiently. “Will you come and take the presents I’d give you? You must come, if you’d have them, for halfway across the bridge is as far as I can go myself. Just beyond Feemalo and Fumalo is the King’s dead-line. You and she may pass both ways. We may not.”

  Roland said, “We thank you for your kindness, sai, but we’re going to refuse. We have food, and clothing is waiting for us up ahead, still on the hoof. Besides, it’s really not that cold.”

  “No,” Susannah agreed, smiling into the three identical—and identically dumbfounded—faces. “It’s really not.”

  “We’ll be pushing on,” Roland said, and made another bow over his cocked leg.

  “Say thankya, say may ya do well,” Susannah put in, and once more spread her invisible skirts.

  She and Roland began to turn away. And that was when Feemalo and Fumalo, still down on their knees, reached inside the open baskets before them.

  Susannah needed no instruction from Roland, not so much as a shouted word. She drew the revolver from her belt and shot down the one on her left—Fumalo—just as he swung a long-barreled silver gun out of the basket. What looked like a scarf was hanging from it. Roland drew from his holster, as blindingly fast as ever, and fired a single shot. Above them the rooks took wing, cawing affrightedly, turning the blue sky momentarily black. Feemalo, also holding one of the silver guns, collapsed slowly forward across his basket of food with a dying expression of surprise on his face and a bullet-hole dead center in his forehead.

  Five

  Fimalo stood where he was, on the far side of the bridge. His hands were still clasped in front of him, but he no longer looked like Stephen King. He now wore the long, yellow-complexioned face of an old man who is dying slowly and not well. What hair he had was a dirty gray rather than luxuriant black. His skull was a peeling garden of eczema. His cheeks, chin, and forehead were lumped with pimples and open sores, some pustulating and some bleeding.

  “What are you, really?” Roland asked him.

  “A hume, just as you are,” said Fimalo, resignedly. “Rando Thoughtful was my name during my years as the Crimson King’s Minister of State. Once upon a time, however, I was plain old Austin Cornwell, from upstate New York. Not the Keystone World, I regret to say, but another. I ran the Niagara Mall at one time, and before that I had a successful career in advertising. You might be interested to know I worked on accounts for both Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit.”

  Susannah ignored this bizarre and unexpected résumé. “So he didn’t have his top boy beheaded, after all,” she said. “What about the three Stephen Kings?”

  “Just a glammer,” said the old man. “Are you going to kill me? Go ahead. All I ask is that you make quick work of it. I’m not well, as you must see.”

  “Was any of what you told us true?” Susannah asked.

  His old eyes looked at her with watery amazement. “All of it was,” he said, and advanced onto the bridge, where two other old men—his assistants, once upon a time, she had no doubt—lay sprawled. “All of it, anyway, save for one lie…and this.” He kicked the baskets over so that the contents spilled out.

  Susannah gave an involuntary shout of horror. Oy was up in a flash, standing protectively in front of her with his short legs spread and his head lowered.

  “It’s all right,” she said, but her voice was still trembling. “I was just…startled.”

  The wicker basket which had seemed to contain all sorts of freshly cooked roasts was actually filled with decaying human limbs—long pork, after all, and in bad shape even considering what it was. The flesh was mostly blue-black and a-teem with maggots.

  And there were no clothes in the other basket. What Fimalo had spilled out of it was actually a shiny knot of dying snakes. Their beady eyes were dull; their forked tongues flickered listlessly in and out; several had already ceased to move.

  “You would have refreshed them wonderfully, if you’d pressed them against your skin,” Fimalo said regretfully.

  “You didn’t really expect that to happen, did you?” Roland asked.

  “No,” the old man admitted. He sat on the bridge with a weary sigh. One of the snakes attempted to crawl into his lap and he pushed it away with a gesture that was both absent and impatient. “But I had my orders, so I did.”

  Susannah was looking at the corpses of the other two with horrified fascination. Feemalo and Fumalo, now just a couple of dead old men, were rotting with unnatural rapidity, their parchment skins deflating toward the bone and oozing slack rivulets of pus. As she watched, the sockets of Feemalo’s skull surfaced like twin periscopes, giving the corpse a momentary expression of shock. Some of the snakes crawled and writhed around these decaying corpses. Others were crawling into the basket of maggoty limbs, seeking the undoubtedly warmer regions at the bottom of the heap. Decay brought its own temporary fevers, and she supposed that she herself might be tempted to luxuriate in it while she could. If she were a snake, that was.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Fimalo asked.

  “Nay,” Roland said, “for your duties aren’t done. You have another coming along behind.”

  Fimalo looked up, a gleam of interest in his rheumy old eyes. “Your son?”

  “Mine, and your master’s, as well. Would you give him a word for me during your palaver?”

  “If I’m alive to give it, sure.”

  “Tell him that I’m old and crafty, while he’s but young. Tell him that if he lies back, he may live awhile yet with his dreams of revenge…although what I’ve done to him requiring his vengeance, I know not. And tell him that if he comes forward, I’ll kill him as I intend to kill his Red Father.”

  “Either you listen and don’t hear or hear and don’t believe,” Fimalo said. Now that his own ruse had been exposed (nothing so glamorous as an uffi, Susannah thought; just a retreaded adman from upstate New York), he seemed unutterably weary. “You cannot kill a creature that has killed itself. Nor can you enter the Dark Tower, for there is only one entrance, and the balcony upon which Los’ is imprisoned commands it. And he’s armed with a sufficiency of weapons. The sneetches alone would seek
you out and slay you before you’d crossed halfway through the field of roses.”

  “That’s our worry,” Roland said, and Susannah thought he’d rarely spoken a truer word: she was worrying about it already. “As for you, will you pass my message on to Mordred, when you see him?”

  Fimalo made a gesture of acquiescence.

  Roland shook his head. “Don’t just flap thy hand at me, cully—let me hear from your mouth.”

  “I’ll pass along your message,” said Fimalo, then added: “If I see him, and we palaver.”

  “You will. ’Day to you, sir.” Roland began to turn away, but Susannah caught his arm and he turned back.

  “Swear to me that all you told us was true,” she bade the ugly ancient sitting on the cobbled bridge and below the cold gaze of the crows, who were beginning to settle back to their former places. What she meant to learn or prove by this she had not the slightest idea. Would she know this man’s lies, even now? Probably not. But she pressed on, just the same. “Swear it on the name of your father, and on his face, as well.”

  The old man raised his right hand to her, palm out, and Susannah saw there were open sores even there. “I swear it on the name of Andrew John Cornwell, of Tioga Springs, New York. And on his face, too. The King of this castle really did run mad, and really did burst those Wizard’s Glasses that had come into his hands. He really did force the staff to take poison and he really did watch them die.” He flung out the hand he’d held up in pledge to the box of severed limbs. “Where do you think I got those, Lady Blackbird? Body Parts R Us?”

  She didn’t understand the reference, and remained still.

  “He really has gone on to the Dark Tower. He’s like the dog in some old fable or other, wanting to make sure that if he can’t get any good from the hay, no one else will, either. I didn’t even lie to you about what was in these boxes, not really. I simply showed you the goods and let you draw your own conclusions.” His smile of cynical pleasure made Susannah wonder if she ought to remind him that Roland, at least, had seen through this trick. She decided it wasn’t worth it.

  “I told you only one outright lie,” said the former Austin Cornwell. “That he’d had me beheaded.”

  “Are you satisfied, Susannah?” Roland asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, although she wasn’t; not really. “Let’s go.”

  “Climb up in Ho Fat, then, and don’t turn thy back on him when thee does. He’s sly.”

  “Tell me about it,” Susannah said, and then did as she was asked.

  “Long days and pleasant nights,” said the former sai Cornwell from where he sat amid the squirming, dying snakes. “May the Man Jesus watch over you and all your clan-fam. And may you show sense before it’s too late for sense and stay away from the Dark Tower!”

  Six

  They retraced their path to the intersection where they had turned away from the Path of the Beam to go to the Crimson King’s castle, and here Roland stopped to rest for a few minutes. A little bit of a breeze had gotten up, and the patriotic bunting flapped. She saw it now looked old and faded. The pictures of Nixon, Lodge, Kennedy, and Johnson had been defaced by graffiti which was itself ancient. All the glammer—such ragged glammer as the Crimson King had been able to manage, at any rate—was gone.

  Masks off, masks off, she thought tiredly. It was a wonderful party, but now it’s finished…and the Red Death holds sway over all.

  She touched the pimple beside her mouth, then looked at the tip of her finger. She expected to see blood or pus or both. There was neither, and that was a relief.

  “How much of it do you believe?” Susannah asked him.

  “Pretty much all of it,” Roland replied.

  “So he’s up there. In the Tower.”

  “Not in it. Trapped outside it.” He smiled. “There’s a big difference.”

  “Is there really? And what will you do to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think that if he did get control of your guns, that he could get back inside the Tower and climb to the top?”

  “Yes.” The reply was immediate.

  “What will you do about it?”

  “Not let him get either of them.” He spoke as if this should have been self-evident, and Susannah supposed it should have been. What she had a way of forgetting was how goddamned literal he was. About everything.

  “You were thinking of trapping Mordred, back at the castle.”

  “Yes,” Roland agreed, “but given what we found there—and what we were told—it seemed better to move on. Simpler. Look.”

  He took out the watch and snapped open the lid. They both observed the second-hand racing its solitary course. But at the same speed as before? Susannah didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think so. She looked up at Roland with her eyebrows raised.

  “Most of the time it’s still right,” Roland said, “but no longer all of the time. I think that it’s losing at least a second every sixth or seventh revolution. Perhaps three to six minutes a day, all told.”

  “That’s not very much.”

  “No,” Roland admitted, putting the watch away, “but it’s a start. Let Mordred do as he will. The Dark Tower lies close beyond the white lands, and I mean to reach it.”

  Susannah could understand his eagerness. She only hoped it wouldn’t make him careless. If it did, Mordred Deschain’s youth might no longer matter. If Roland made the right mistake at the wrong moment, she, he, and Oy might never see the Dark Tower at all.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a great fluttering from behind them. Not quite lost within it came a human sound that began as a howl and quickly rose to a shriek. Although distance diminished that cry, the horror and pain in it were all too clear. At last, mercifully, it faded.

  “The Crimson King’s Minister of State has entered the clearing,” Roland said.

  Susannah looked back toward the castle. She could see its blackish-red ramparts, but nothing else. She was glad she could see nothing else.

  Mordred’s a-hungry, she thought. Her heart was beating fast and she thought she had never been so frightened in her whole life—not lying next to Mia as she gave birth, not even in the blackness under Castle Discordia.

  Mordred’s a-hungry…but now he’ll be fed.

  Seven

  The old man who had begun life as Austin Cornwell and who would end it as Rando Thoughtful sat at the castle end of the bridge. The rooks waited above him, perhaps sensing that the day’s excitement was not yet done. Thoughtful was warm enough thanks to the pea-coat he was wearing, and he had helped himself to a mouthful of brandy before leaving to meet Roland and his blackbird ladyfriend. Well…perhaps that wasn’t quite true. Perhaps it was Brass and Compson (also known as Feemalo and Fumalo) who’d had the mouthfuls of the King’s best brandy, and Los’s ex-Minister of State who had polished off the last third of the bottle.

  Whatever the cause, the old man fell asleep, and the coming of Mordred Red-Heel didn’t wake him. He sat with his chin on his chest and drool trickling from between his pursed lips, looking like a baby who has fallen asleep in his highchair. The birds on the parapets and walkways were gathered more thickly than ever. Surely they would have flown at the approach of the young Prince, but he looked up at them and made a gesture in the air: the open right hand waved brusquely across the face, then curled into a fist and pulled downward. Wait, it said.

  Mordred stopped on the town side of the bridge, sniffing delicately at the decayed meat. That smell had been charming enough to bring him here even though he knew Roland and Susannah had continued along the Path of the Beam. Let them and their pet bumbler get fairly back on their way, was the boy’s thinking. This wasn’t the time to close the gap. Later, perhaps. Later his White Daddy would let down his guard, if only for a moment, and then Mordred would have him.

  For dinner, he hoped, but lunch or breakfast would do almost as well.

  When we last saw this fellow, he was only

  (baby-bunting baby-dear
baby bring your berries here)

  an infant. The creature standing beyond the gates of the Crimson King’s castle had grown into a boy who looked about nine years old. Not a handsome boy; not the sort anyone (except for his lunatic mother) would have called comely. This had less to do with his complicated genetic inheritance than with plain starvation. The face beneath the dry spall of black hair was haggard and far too thin. The flesh beneath Mordred’s blue bombardier’s eyes was a discolored, pouchy purple. His complexion was a birdshot blast of sores and blemishes. These, like the pimple beside Susannah’s mouth, could have been the result of his journey through the poisoned lands, but surely Mordred’s diet had something to do with it. He could have stocked up on canned goods before setting out from the checkpoint beyond the tunnel’s mouth—Roland and Susannah had left plenty behind—but he hadn’t thought to do so. He was, as Roland knew, still learning the tricks of survival. The only thing Mordred had taken from the checkpoint Quonset was a rotting railwayman’s pillowtick jacket and a pair of serviceable boots. Finding the boots was good fortune indeed, although they had mostly fallen apart as the trek continued.

  Had he been a hume—or even a more ordinary were-creature, for that matter—Mordred would have died in the Badlands, coat or no coat, boots or no boots. Because he was what he was, he had called the rooks to him when he was hungry, and the rooks had no choice but to come. The birds made nasty eating and the bugs he summoned from beneath the parched (and still faintly radioactive) rocks were even worse, but he had choked them down. One day he had touched the mind of a weasel and bade it come. It had been a scrawny, wretched thing, on the edge of starvation itself, but it tasted like the world’s finest steak after the birds and the bugs. Mordred had changed into his other self and gathered the weasel into his seven-legged embrace, sucking and eating until there was nothing left but a torn piece of fur. He would have gladly eaten another dozen, but that had been the only one.

  And now there was a whole basket of food set before him. It was well-aged, true, but what of that? Even the maggots would provide nourishment. More than enough to carry him into the snowy woods southeast of the castle, which would be teeming with game.